scholarly journals Introduction: Reading Silence in the Long Nineteenth-Century Women’s Life Writing Archive

2018 ◽  
Vol 0 (27) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexis Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Writing

scholarly journals Women's Life Writing and Reputation: A Case Study of Mary Darby Robinson

Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-202
Author(s):  
Susan Civale
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Feminine Persona

The posthumously published Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson (1801) has been read as a final – but flawed – attempt to defend the conduct and rescue the reputation of the notorious actress, poet, and one-time royal mistress, Mary Darby Robinson (1758–1800). Narrating her life as a pathetic tale of transgression and suffering, the Memoirs seems destabilised by inconsistencies in structure and gaps in content which are often discussed by modern critics as shortcomings: evidence of self-censorship, ‘confused’ intentions, or an inability to fashion an acceptable feminine persona. However, these so-called shortcomings may comprise a nuanced strategy of self-presentation designed to evoke curiosity and sympathy. Robinson's Memoirs was reprinted throughout the nineteenth century, spurring numerous novels, mini-biographies, and periodical articles. By examining nineteenth-century responses to the Memoirs, this essay argues for Robinson's life writing as innovative and influential, and gestures to the benefits of extending the traditional ‘edges’ of Romanticism in terms of both genre and period.

Life Writing and the Victorians

2014 ◽  
pp. 44-62
Author(s):  
Trev Broughton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
The Past ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities

This chapter uses Margaret Oliphant’s work on a biography of the deposed Church of Scotland preacher Edward Irving (1792–1834) as a case study in the professionalization of Life writing in the nineteenth century. It points to some of the literary developments and fashions that made biography popular despite its tendency to over-respectful, hyper-respectable treatment of its subjects. It charts some of the challenges and opportunities biographical evidence and research afforded, including the chance to probe the conventions of gender. It argues that biography offered a space in which authors—including authors outside the academy—could participate in the writing of the past and in the representation of local and national identities, as well as in the ongoing discussion about heroes and their role in Victorian culture.

scholarly journals Unlikely Documents? Exploring Finnish Nineteenth-Century Life Writing From Below

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. LWFB49-LWFB66
Author(s):  
Anna Kuismin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Rural People ◽  
Literary Genres

The expression unlikely documents in the title of this article is coined by Marlene Kadar and Jeanne Perreault. It refers to the appearance of auto/biography in unexpected places, texts that “bespeak either an extended or a limited story about a person’s life.” The article focuses on nineteenth-century Finnish life writing from below, texts produced by rural people with no formal education. The cases analysed include a notebook of hymns by a mistress of a farm, a chronicle penned by a modest country tailor, wooden boards inscribed by a saddle maker living on poor relief and textiles produced by a weaver woman. Seen in their contexts, these extraordinary texts prove to be understandable, even plausible: people who were not well-versed in literary genres and styles, had to make their choices from resources that were available there and then. In spite of the limited repertoire of models, the authors were able to express themselves and bring their subjectivity to the fore, in one way or another. Their texts can also be seen as tools of empowerment and vehicles of creativity for people in marginal positions at the time when writing did not belong to the life of the great majority.

scholarly journals Biography and Life-Writing

2020 ◽  
pp. 76-102
Author(s):  
Christopher Wiley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Strong Relationship ◽  
Music History ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
History And Criticism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

This chapter outlines the proliferation of musical biography and life-writing in its multifarious forms across Europe in the long nineteenth century, and its role in establishing and perpetuating the canon, shaping the reception history of specific composers, constructing exemplary lives, providing firm foundations for the intellectual culture of the time, and maintaining a strong relationship to music history and criticism. Two case studies explore distinctive examples of “popular” manifestations of nineteenth-century music-biographical writing by influential authors to educate and entertain wide communities of autodidactic readers. This first concerns a two-volume compilation of anecdotes, surveyed for its reflection of Victorian values and musical preoccupations; the second, a collected biography whose close reading reveals much about the passive role into which women were repeatedly cast in contemporaneous life-writing on the Great Composers. A concluding section considers the extent of the impact and continued indebtedness of modern musical biography and musicology to the legacy of nineteenth-century intellectual developments.

scholarly journals Ecce Homo—Behold the Human! Reading Life-Narratives in Times of Colonial Modernity

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 300
Author(s):  
Nandini Bhattacharya
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Dense Matrix ◽  
Life Narratives ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Writing Project ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Culturally Informed ◽  
Writing Genres ◽  
Ecce Homo

The essay explores Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Krishnacaritra—published in 1886—the life of a humanised god, as engaged in cross cultural dialogues with John Robert Seeley’s Ecce Homo, Natural Religion, and The Expansion of England in particular, and the broader European tendency of naturalising religions in general. It contends that the rise of historicised life writing genres in Europe was organically related to the demythologised, verifiable god-lives writing project. Bankimchandra’s Krishnacarita is embedded within a dense matrix of nineteenth century Indian secular life writing projects and its projection of Krishna as a cultural icon within an incipient nationalist imagining. The essay while exploring such fraught writing projects in Victorian England and nineteenth century colonial Bengal, concludes that ‘secularism’ arrives as not as religion’s Other but as its camouflaging in ethico-cultural guise. Secularism rides on the backs of such demystified god life narratives to rationalise ethico-culturally informed global empires.

scholarly journals Mobility, Transport and Social Inclusion: Lessons from History

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 100-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Pooley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
British Society ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mobility System ◽  
The Rich

This paper argues that although it is now possible to travel more quickly and easily than ever before, transport-related social exclusion is more likely than it was in the past. Using evidence drawn from life writing and oral testimonies I examine the ways in which people accessed everyday transport over the past two centuries. In the early nineteenth century mobility options were limited and most people travelled in similar ways, though the rich always had access to the fastest and most comfortable transportation. From the mid-nineteenth century the railways provided fast travel for most people. Progressively, in the twentieth century British society became car dependent so that those without access to a car were disadvantaged. Such transport-related social exclusion was exacerbated by the denuding of public transport, and by heightened expectations for mobility which often could not be achieved. It is argued that a return to a less differentiated mobility system could increase transport-related social inclusion.

A Gendered Experience

2021 ◽  
pp. 124-158
Author(s):  
Nadieszda Kizenko
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
The Military ◽  
Women's Reading ◽  
Autobiographical Narrative

Chapter 4 examines confession in the first half of the nineteenth century through the lens of gender. As men often served in the military or held government positions, they were more likely to be suspected of conspiracies or treason and to experience confession as a means of discipline and surveillance. As a result, their depictions of confession showed its external, social, and political side. By contrast, women came to approach confession as an autobiographical narrative and a form of private literary production, seeking closer relationships with their father-confessors. Sacramental confession became part of a textual process of Russian women’s reading, devotion, and life-writing. Both in women’s going to confession in larger numbers and in their desire for a more meaningful confession, confession became an increasingly feminine phenomenon.

“Habituation Devours Things”: Radwa Ashour’s Specters and the E(n)strangement of Life-Writing

Hawwa ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 169-194
Author(s):  
Bernadette Andrea
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political History ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
Moral Space ◽  
Geographical Space ◽  
Final Closure

InSpecters, her multi-genre novel-length work of life-writing, Radwa Ashour engages with the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of “enstrangement” or “defamiliarization” to explore how history shapes lives and lives shape history. The double-voiced narration andmise-en-abymestructure of the novel, a mirror-within-a-mirror plot layered with metafictional passages on writing, coheres through the motifs of ghosts, threads, and silences. These motifs bring to the fore, if only momentarily, those individuals whom history has effaced from the nineteenth century onwards. Ashour, who in her words seeks to construct a “geographical space dense with a resonant history, a composite of past and present, overlapping territories constitutive of an emotional and moral space for self-awareness and self-definition”, engages the theory of enstrangement on both counts as she crafts a personal and political history that resists final closure and affirms life.

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