Face

The introduction of the book lays out the historical and theoretical stakes of its project. It works to chart the movement from the child-in-need-of rescue (characterized by Henry James’s 1898 novella Turn of the Screw) to the child-as-resource by the way of Kazou Ishiguro’s 2005 Never Let Me Go. As Carolyn Steedman argues in Strange Dislocations, scientific accounts of physiological growth and development were central to the construction of the child as well as to evolutionary thought, a congruence expressed in recapitulation theory. In essence, the link forged between the child and the species helped to shape eugenic historiography, focalized reproduction as a matter of concern for racial nationalism, and made the child a mode of time keeping.

Autobiographies of a generation? Carolyn Steedman, Luisa Passerini and the memory of 1968

The meeting-point between memory studies and auto/biographical studies provides new perspectives on the study of the radical generation of 1968 through life-writing techniques, including oral history. A comparison between Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, published in 1986, and Luisa Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968, published in 1988, suggests that belonging to this generation involves tensions between the social master narrative of 1968 and auto/biographical memories. Steedman and Passerini’s personal narratives relate in complex ways to this master narrative, and exploring these ambiguities helps us to generate further innovation in ‘generational thinking’ as well as a comparative understanding of the ‘memory studies’ of two of the most important thinkers in British and Italian contemporary history.

Subjects of Interest: Biography, Politics and Gender History

This article discusses the biographical genre in history in the light of recent trends in gender and cultural history. It suggests that biography has the possibility of building on the strengths of these developments, but only through a resistance to the temptations of authoritative meta-narrative. Instead, it points to the creative unevenness of lives and the potential of using that ambiguity to describe in more interesting and creative ways both the lives of individual subjects and the connections between those individuals and larger collective identities. The argument reviews the work of authors such as Becky Conekin, Sheila Rowbotham and Carolyn Steedman.