Life Writing and the End of Empire

Life Writing and the End of Empire PDF Author: Emma Parker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350353809
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book

Book Description
The dismantlement of the British Empire had a profound impact on many celebrated white Anglophone writers of the twentieth century, particularly those who were raised in former British colonial territories and returned to the metropole after the Second World War. Formal decolonisation meant that these authors were unable to 'go home' to their colonial childhoods, a historical juncture with profound consequences for how they wrote and recorded their own lives. Moving beyond previous discussions of imperial and colonial nostalgia, Life Writing and the End of Empire is the first critical study of white memoirists and autobiographers who rewrote their memories of empire across numerous life narratives. By focussing on these processual homecomings, Emma Parker's study asks what it means to be 'at home' in memories of empire, whether in the settler farms of Southern Rhodesia, or amidst the neon lights of Shanghai's International Settlement. These discussions trace the legacies of empire to the habitations and detritus of everyday life, from mansions and modest railway huts, to empty swimming pools, heirlooms, and photograph albums. Exploring works by Penelope Lively, J. G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, and Janet Frame, this study establishes new connections between authors usually discussed for their fiction, and who have been hitherto unrecognised as post-imperial life writers. Offering close, sustained analysis of autobiographies, memoirs, travel narratives, and autofictions, and identifying new subgenres such as 'speculative life writing', this book advances rich new readings of autobiographical narrative. By tracing the continuing importance of colonialism to white subjectivity, the role of imperial memory in Britain, and the ways that these unsettling forces move beneath the surface of modern and contemporary literature, this study offers new conceptual insights to the fields of life writing and postcolonial studies.

Life Writing and the End of Empire

Life Writing and the End of Empire PDF Author: Emma Parker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350353809
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book

Book Description
The dismantlement of the British Empire had a profound impact on many celebrated white Anglophone writers of the twentieth century, particularly those who were raised in former British colonial territories and returned to the metropole after the Second World War. Formal decolonisation meant that these authors were unable to 'go home' to their colonial childhoods, a historical juncture with profound consequences for how they wrote and recorded their own lives. Moving beyond previous discussions of imperial and colonial nostalgia, Life Writing and the End of Empire is the first critical study of white memoirists and autobiographers who rewrote their memories of empire across numerous life narratives. By focussing on these processual homecomings, Emma Parker's study asks what it means to be 'at home' in memories of empire, whether in the settler farms of Southern Rhodesia, or amidst the neon lights of Shanghai's International Settlement. These discussions trace the legacies of empire to the habitations and detritus of everyday life, from mansions and modest railway huts, to empty swimming pools, heirlooms, and photograph albums. Exploring works by Penelope Lively, J. G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, and Janet Frame, this study establishes new connections between authors usually discussed for their fiction, and who have been hitherto unrecognised as post-imperial life writers. Offering close, sustained analysis of autobiographies, memoirs, travel narratives, and autofictions, and identifying new subgenres such as 'speculative life writing', this book advances rich new readings of autobiographical narrative. By tracing the continuing importance of colonialism to white subjectivity, the role of imperial memory in Britain, and the ways that these unsettling forces move beneath the surface of modern and contemporary literature, this study offers new conceptual insights to the fields of life writing and postcolonial studies.

Life Writing After Empire

Life Writing After Empire PDF Author: Astrid Rasch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131540544X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 144

Get Book

Book Description
A watershed moment of the twentieth century, the end of empire saw upheavals to global power structures and national identities. However, decolonisation profoundly affected individual subjectivities too. Life Writing After Empire examines how people around the globe have made sense of the post-imperial condition through the practice of life writing in its multifarious expressions, from auto/biography through travel writing to oral history and photography. Through interdisciplinary approaches that draw on literature and history alike, the contributors explore how we might approach these genres differently in order to understand how individual life writing reflects broader societal changes. From far-flung corners of the former British Empire, people have turned to life writing to manage painful or nostalgic memories, as well as to think about the past and future of the nation anew through the personal experience. In a range of innovative and insightful contributions, some of the foremost scholars of the field challenge the way we think about narrative, memory and identity after empire. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

Writing the Empire

Writing the Empire PDF Author: Eva-Marie Kröller
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487507577
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 536

Get Book

Book Description
Crossing time and oceans, this fascinating history of the McIlwraiths tracks the family's imperial identities across the generations to tell a story of anthropology and empire.

Life Writing and the End of Empire

Life Writing and the End of Empire PDF Author: Emma Parker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350353817
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book

Book Description
The dismantlement of the British Empire had a profound impact on many celebrated white Anglophone writers of the twentieth century, particularly those who were raised in former British colonial territories and returned to the metropole after the Second World War. Formal decolonisation meant that these authors were unable to 'go home' to their colonial childhoods, a historical juncture with profound consequences for how they wrote and recorded their own lives. Moving beyond previous discussions of imperial and colonial nostalgia, Life Writing and the End of Empire is the first critical study of white memoirists and autobiographers who rewrote their memories of empire across numerous life narratives. By focussing on these processual homecomings, Emma Parker's study asks what it means to be 'at home' in memories of empire, whether in the settler farms of Southern Rhodesia, or amidst the neon lights of Shanghai's International Settlement. These discussions trace the legacies of empire to the habitations and detritus of everyday life, from mansions and modest railway huts, to empty swimming pools, heirlooms, and photograph albums. Exploring works by Penelope Lively, J. G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, and Janet Frame, this study establishes new connections between authors usually discussed for their fiction, and who have been hitherto unrecognised as post-imperial life writers. Offering close, sustained analysis of autobiographies, memoirs, travel narratives, and autofictions, and identifying new subgenres such as 'speculative life writing', this book advances rich new readings of autobiographical narrative. By tracing the continuing importance of colonialism to white subjectivity, the role of imperial memory in Britain, and the ways that these unsettling forces move beneath the surface of modern and contemporary literature, this study offers new conceptual insights to the fields of life writing and postcolonial studies.

Workshops of Empire

Workshops of Empire PDF Author: Eric Bennett
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609383729
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book

Book Description
During and just after World War II, an influential group of American writers and intellectuals projected a vision for literature that would save the free world. Novels, stories, plays, and poems, they believed, could inoculate weak minds against simplistic totalitarian ideologies, heal the spiritual wounds of global catastrophe, and just maybe prevent the like from happening again. As the Cold War began, high-minded and well-intentioned scholars, critics, and writers from across the political spectrum argued that human values remained crucial to civilization and that such values stood in dire need of formulation and affirmation. They believed that the complexity of literature—of ideas bound to concrete images, of ideologies leavened with experiences—enshrined such values as no other medium could. Creative writing emerged as a graduate discipline in the United States amid this astonishing swirl of grand conceptions. The early workshops were formed not only at the time of, but in the image of, and under the tremendous urgency of, the postwar imperatives for the humanities. Vivid renderings of personal experience would preserve the liberal democratic soul—a soul menaced by the gathering leftwing totalitarianism of the USSR and the memory of fascism in Italy and Germany. Workshops of Empire explores this history via the careers of Paul Engle at the University of Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford. In the story of these founding fathers of the discipline, Eric Bennett discovers the cultural, political, literary, intellectual, and institutional underpinnings of creative writing programs within the university. He shows how the model of literary technique championed by the first writing programs—a model that values the interior and private life of the individual, whose experiences are not determined by any community, ideology, or political system—was born out of this Cold War context and continues to influence the way creative writing is taught, studied, read, and written into the twenty-first century.

Reading Mediated Life Narratives

Reading Mediated Life Narratives PDF Author: Amy Carlson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350324671
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book

Book Description
Calling attention to the unseen mediation and re-mediation of life narratives in online and physical spaces, this ground-breaking exploration uncovers the ever-changing strategies that authors, artists, publishers, curators, archivists and social media corporations adopt to shape, control or resist the auto/biographical in these texts. Concentrating on contemporary life texts found in the material book, museums, on social media and archives that present perceptions of individuality and autonomy, Reading Mediated Life Narratives exposes the traces of personal, cultural, technological, and political mediation that must be considered when developing reading strategies for such life narratives. Amy Carlson asks such questions as what agents act upon these narratives; what do the text, the creator, and the audience gain, and what do they lose; how do constantly evolving technologies shape or stymie the auto/biographical “I”; and finally, how do the mediations affect larger issues of social and collective memory? An examination of the range of sites at which vulnerability and intervention can occur, Carlson does not condemn but stages an intercession, showing us how it is increasingly necessary to register mediated agents and processes modifying the witnessing or recuperation of original texts that could condition our reception. With careful thought on how we remember, how we create and control our pictures, voices, words, and records, Reading Mediated Life Narratives reveals how we construct and negotiate our social identities and memories, but also what systems control us.

Human Rights in Graphic Life Narrative

Human Rights in Graphic Life Narrative PDF Author: Olga Michael
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350329762
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book

Book Description
Surveying print and digital graphic life narratives about people who become 'othered' within Western contexts, this book investigates how comics and graphic novels witness human rights transgressions in contemporary Anglophone culture and how they can promote social justice. With thought given to how the graphic form can offer a powerful counterpoint to the legal, humanitarian and media discourses that dehumanise the most violated and dispossessed, but also how these works may unconsciously reproduce Western neo-colonial presentations of the 'other,' Olga Michael focuses on gender, death, space, and border violence within graphic life narratives depicting suffering across different geo- and biopolitical locations. Combining the familiar with the lesser-known, this book covers works by artists such as Joe Sacco, Thi Bui, Mia Kirshner, Phoebe Gloeckner, Kamel Khélif, Francesca Sanna, Gabi Froden, Benjamin Dix and Lindsay Pollock, as well as Safdar Ahmed and Ali Dorani/Eaten Fish. Interdisciplinary in its consideration of life writing, comics and human rights studies, and comparative in approach, this book explores such topics as the aesthetics of visualised suffering; spatial articulations of human rights violations; the occurrence of violations whilst crossing borders; the gendered dimensions of visually captured violence; and how human rights discourses intersect with graphic depictions of the dead. In so doing, Michael establishes how to read human rights and social justice comics in relation to an escalating global crisis and deftly complicates negotiations of 'otherness.' A vitally important work to the humanities sector, this book underscores the significance of postcolonial decolonized reading acts as forms of secondary witness.

Empire's End - A Roman Story (Voices #4)

Empire's End - A Roman Story (Voices #4) PDF Author: Leila Rasheed
Publisher: Voices
ISBN: 9781407191393
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book

Book Description
A gripping Roman adventure told by a young North African girl who sets out on a danger-filled journey toBritain. When, Camilla, a young North African girl travels with her mother and father from Leptis Magna to Rome in 207 AD, she believes that she is going to the centre of the world. But just a few months later, the little family is dispatched to the very edge of it: Britannica. Tragedy strikes and, left alone with the Empress while her father travels north, Camilla has to navigate the tricky world of of secrets and danger in this cold place she must now call home. In this heart-stopping adventure based on real historical events, Leila Rasheed shows us a dangerous and intriguing time in Britain that's sure to fascinate young readers. VOICES: A thrilling series showcasing some of the UK's finest writers for young people. Voices reflects the authentic, unsung stories of our past. Each shows that, even in times of great upheaval, a myriad of people have arrived on this island and made a home for themselves - from Roman times to thepresent day.

Empire of Wild

Empire of Wild PDF Author: Cherie Dimaline
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006297596X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book

Book Description
“Deftly written, gripping and informative. Empire of Wild is a rip-roaring read!”—Margaret Atwood, From Instagram “Empire of Wild is doing everything I love in a contemporary novel and more. It is tough, funny, beautiful, honest and propulsive—all the while telling a story that needs to be told by a person who needs to be telling it.”—Tommy Orange, author of There There A bold and brilliant new indigenous voice in contemporary literature makes her American debut with this kinetic, imaginative, and sensuous fable inspired by the traditional Canadian Métis legend of the Rogarou—a werewolf-like creature that haunts the roads and woods of native people’s communities. Joan has been searching for her missing husband, Victor, for nearly a year—ever since that terrible night they’d had their first serious argument hours before he mysteriously vanished. Her Métis family has lived in their tightly knit rural community for generations, but no one keeps the old ways . . . until they have to. That moment has arrived for Joan. One morning, grieving and severely hungover, Joan hears a shocking sound coming from inside a revival tent in a gritty Walmart parking lot. It is the unmistakable voice of Victor. Drawn inside, she sees him. He has the same face, the same eyes, the same hands, though his hair is much shorter and he's wearing a suit. But he doesn't seem to recognize Joan at all. He insists his name is Eugene Wolff, and that he is a reverend whose mission is to spread the word of Jesus and grow His flock. Yet Joan suspects there is something dark and terrifying within this charismatic preacher who professes to be a man of God . . . something old and very dangerous. Joan turns to Ajean, an elderly foul-mouthed card shark who is one of the few among her community steeped in the traditions of her people and knowledgeable about their ancient enemies. With the help of the old Métis and her peculiar Johnny-Cash-loving, twelve-year-old nephew Zeus, Joan must find a way to uncover the truth and remind Reverend Wolff who he really is . . . if he really is. Her life, and those of everyone she loves, depends upon it.

Modernism and Race

Modernism and Race PDF Author: Len Platt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139500252
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Get Book

Book Description
The 'transnational' turn has transformed modernist studies, challenging Western authority over modernism and positioning race and racial theories at the very centre of how we now understand modern literature. Modernism and Race examines relationships between racial typologies and literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on fin de siécle versions of anthropology, sociology, political science, linguistics and biology. Collectively, these essays interrogate the anxieties and desires that are expressed in, or projected onto, racialized figures. They include new outlines of how the critical field has developed, revaluations of canonical modernist figures like James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford and Wyndham Lewis, and accounts of writers often positioned at the margins of modernism, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay and the Holocaust writers Solomon Perel and Gisella Perl. This collection by leading scholars of modernism will make an important contribution to a growing field.