Autobiographical fiction

2003 ◽  
pp. 71-93
Keyword(s):  
Autobiographical Fiction

Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy: Politics in the Vernaculars

2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernice Schrank
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Great Variability ◽  
The Political ◽  
Standard English ◽  
Cultural Assumptions ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
Autobiographical Fiction ◽  
Literature And Language

This essay examines the political uses to which Behan puts language in his autobiographical fiction, Borstal Boy, both as an instrument of domination and a means of liberation. Identifying Standard English language and literature as important components of the British imperial project, Behan creates, as a linguistic alternative, ‘englishes’, a composite language in which differences of geography, class, age, education, and occupation create a demotic speech of great variability and expressive force. In so doing, Behan sabotages the cultural assumptions and justifications for colonial exploitation embedded and validated in Standard English literature and language.

A Biography of Faith

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linden Bicket
Keyword(s):  
Religious Life ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Autobiographical Writing ◽  
Muriel Spark ◽  
Autobiographical Fiction ◽  
Spiritual Self ◽  
Intertextual Connections ◽  
Clear Idea

This chapter concentrates on three major biographical strands in order to obtain a clear idea of Brown’s literary Catholicism. It explores the trajectory of Brown’s religious life through his unpublished early manuscripts, autobiographical fiction, and letters to various correspondents. It examines his autobiography, For the Islands I Sing, in relation to the traditions of spiritual self-writing by other literary converts. The chapter also investigates the intertextual connections between George Mackay Brown’s work and the autobiographical writing of John Henry Newman, Edwin Muir, and Muriel Spark, among others.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Gretchen Murphy
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
Women Authors ◽  
Judith Sargent Murray ◽  
Autobiographical Fiction ◽  
Lydia Sigourney ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
Democratic Life

Beginning with a discussion of partisan politics in Catharine Sedgwick’s juvenile letters and her autobiographical fiction, the introduction makes a case for considering five prominent New England women authors (Sedgwick, Judith Sargent Murray, Sally Sayward Wood, Lydia Sigourney, and Harriet Beecher Stowe) as profoundly influenced by and invested in a Federalist understanding of religion in a republic. This investment, which treats Protestant Christianity as a force necessary for public morality in democratic life, shaped their writing careers and forms an unacknowledged contribution to political and religious debates about church and state in the early republic and nineteenth century. Situating this argument as a contribution to scholarship in literary studies, postsecular studies, and political history, the introduction explains contributions to each area.

scholarly journals Towards an Ethic of Reciprocity: The Messy Business of Co-creating Research with Voices from the Archive

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Jane McLaughlan
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Patient Experience ◽  
Academic Practice ◽  
Doctoral Research ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Mental Hospitals ◽  
Comprehensive Account ◽  
Autobiographical Fiction ◽  
Janet Frame ◽  
Made In

Do contemporary practices of attribution go far enough in acknowledging the contribution that others make to our work, particularly when they speak from the archive? The autobiographical fiction Faces in the Water (1961) from acclaimed author Janet Frame (1924-2004) draws on her experiences of residing in various New Zealand mental hospitals between 1945 and 1953. It is a rare and comprehensive account of the patient experience of these institutions that provided a critical lens for my doctoral research. Perhaps more importantly, through this text Frame taught me how difficult histories should be written, about the ambiguities we must accept and the value adjustments to be made in order to make sense of confounding inhumanity. Nowhere within my dissertation is the depth of this contribution acknowledged; a position developed out of respect for her family’s active opposition to the ‘patronising’ and ‘pathologising discourse’ that continues to haunt contemporary receptions of Frame’s work. Within this paper I employ autoethnography to make explicit the process of working through a question that haunted me well beyond the completion of my doctoral research: whether contemporary practices of citation and acknowledgement are sufficient to value research contributions from beyond the grave. I will examine whether Frame’s contribution is commensurate with contemporary qualifications for co-authorship and the burdens of academic practice that act to suppress these conversations.

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