Author: Conference on Political Memoirs (1989 : University of British Columbia)
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780714634715
Size: 11.57 MB
Format: PDF, ePub, Mobi
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351
View: 4393
The genre of political memoir has a long history, from its origins in classical times through its popularity in the age of courts and cabinets to its ubiquity in modern mass cultures where retired politicians increasingly attract large and eager readerships for their revelations. Yet there is virtually no scholarly criticism which treats this complex form of literature as a distinct genre, fusing autobiographical, historical and political elements. The essays in this book draw together the collaborative findings of a team of British, European, American and Canadian scholars to present a pioneering historical and critical study of the genre of political memoir, analysing the development of its distinct functions and assessing leading memoirists in European, American, Canadian, Indian and Japanese societies. The editor, George Egerton, introduces the volume and surveys the principal features of the genre over its long history. Otto Pflanze analyses the memoirs of Bismarck; Robert Young, Milton Israel, Joshua Mostow and Robert Bothwell study the memoir literature of France, India, Japan and Canada respectively. Barry Gough and Tim Travers look at naval and military memoirists, while Zara Steiner, B.J.C. McKercher and Valerie Cromwell assess the memoirs of diplomats and their families. Leonidas Hill examines the memoirs of leading Nazis. John Munro, Francis Heller and Robert Ferrell convey inside information on the making of memoirs - notably by the Canadian Prime Ministers Diefenbaker and Pearson and the American President Truman. Stephen Ambrose assays Nixon as memoirist, while Janos Bak portrays the status of memoirists under totalitarian regimes. Wesley Wark and John Naylor analyse theproliferation of intelligence memoirs and government efforts to protect official secrets from the revelations of the candid memoirist. The principal findings reached by the contributors in their study of this problematic but influential genre are set out by the editor in the concluding chapter.
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Author: Neil Ramsey
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9781409410348
Size: 31.76 MB
Format: PDF, ePub, Docs
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269
View: 5155
Examining the memoirs and autobiographies of British soldiers during the Romantic period, Neil Ramsey explores the effect of these as cultural forms mediating warfare to the reading public during and immediately after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Forming a distinct and commercially successful genre that in turn inspired the military and nautical novels that flourished in the 1830s, military memoirs profoundly shaped nineteenth-century British culture's understanding of war as Romantic adventure, establishing images of the nation's middle-class soldier heroes that would be of enduring significance through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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Author: Lynda M. Thompson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719055737
Size: 24.11 MB
Format: PDF
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 243
View: 439
This reappraisal of the "scandalous memoirists," Constantia Phillips and Laetitia Pilkington, overturns scholarship's traditional discrediting of them. Because their reputations for immorality led them to be despised and disbelieved, their revealing contributions of the period--of the law, of high and low society, of sexual mores, of women's attempts to bypass patriarchal prescription--have been obscured. Lynda M. Thompson credits the memoirists with sharply accurate criticism of their society's double standards and opportunistic stirring of public debate.
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Author: Norbert Bugeja
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136252843
Size: 72.10 MB
Format: PDF, ePub
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242
View: 862
This book reconsiders the notion of liminality in postcolonial critical discourse today. By visiting Mashriqi writers of memoir, Bugeja offers a unique intervention in the understanding of 'in-between' and ‘threshold’ states in present-day postcolonialist thought. His analysis situates liminal space as a fraught form of consciousness that mediates between conditions of historical contingency and the memorializing present. Within the present Mashriqi memoir form, liminal spaces may be read as articulations of 'representational spaces' — narrative spaces that, based as they are within the histories of local communities, are nonetheless redolent with memorial and imaginary elements. Liminal consciousness today, Bugeja argues, is a direct consequence of the impact of volatile present-day memories on the re-conception of the open wounds of history. Incisive readings of life-writings by Mourid Barghouti, Amin Maalouf, Orhan Pamuk, Amos Oz, and Wadad Makdisi Cortas demonstrate the double-edged representational chasm that opens up when present acts of memorializing are brought to bear upon the elusive histories of the early-twentieth-century Mashriq. Sifting through the wide-ranging theoretical literature on liminality and challenging received views of the concept, this book proposes a nuanced, materialist, and original rethinking of the liminal as a more vigilant outlook onto the political, literary and historical predicaments of the contemporary Middle East.
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Author: Jan Chryzostom Pasek
Publisher: New York : Kosciuszko Foundation
ISBN:
Size: 28.53 MB
Format: PDF, Mobi
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 529
View: 2883
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Author: Ron McFarland
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786451637
Size: 63.48 MB
Format: PDF, Mobi
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219
View: 2790
The autobiography has not always been acknowledged as true literature. Since 1970, however, American memoirs have revealed themselves as a respectable literary genre, distinct with an inimitable literary voice and a unique capacity to intersect narration and reflection. This study focuses critical attention on ten memoirs from the northern U.S. Rockies, including Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. By comparing memoirs representing states that share similar demographic, ecological, and socio-economic characteristics, this historic and literary analysis reveals both commonalities and divergences among American Western memoirs. Each chapter compares two books of similar thematic concerns, ranging from regional values and rural evolution to dynamic landscapes and the experiences of American Indians.
