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Histories of the Self interrogates historians' work with personal narratives. It introduces students and researchers to scholarly approaches to diaries, letters, oral history and memoirs as sources that give access to intimate aspects of the past.
Historians are interested as never before in how people thought and felt about their lives. This turn to the personal has focused attention on the capacity of subjective records to illuminate both individual experiences and the wider world within which narrators lived. However, sources such as letters, diaries, memoirs and oral history have been the subject of intense debate over the last forty years, concerning both their value and the uses to which they can be put. This book traces the engagement of historians of the personal with notions of historical reliability, and with the issue of representativeness, and it explores the ways in which they have overcome the scepticism of earlier practitioners. It celebrates their adventures with the meanings of the past buried in personal narratives and applauds their transformation of historical practice.
Supported by case studies from across the globe and spanning the fifteenth to twenty-first centuries, Histories of the Self is essential reading for students and researchers interested in the ways personal testimony has been and can be used by historians.
List of contents
Chapter 1. Introduction 'Things happen in your life, you see, you never know what is going to happen' Terminology The turn to the personal Archives Structure of the book
Chapter 2. Historians' Uses of Letters Reading letters for fact Letter-writing as a social and cultural practice: the case of war letters Gender and the letter Epistolary constructions of the self Conclusion
Chapter 3. Historians and the Diary The diarist as observer The diary as a 'technology of the self' Gender and the diary: the making of masculinity Contradictions and incoherence The diary and the psyche The diary and privacy The public and the private Conclusion
Chapter 4. Autobiography, the Memoir and the Historian Reading memoir for fact Reading for subjectivity Gendered subjectivities and models of autobiography The present meets the past Audience Rethinking the past for the present Conclusion
Chapter 5. Oral History and Historical Practice Reliability and the cultural turn Public discourse, gender, and personal recall Personal memory and popular culture Evasions and silences Conclusion
Chapter 6. Representativeness Historians and the sample Cultural criteria of selection The luminosity of the single case The exceptional normal Conclusion
Chapter 7. Conclusion Authenticity Multiple genres Alternative genres and new directions
About the author
Penny Summerfield is Professor Emerita of Modern History at the University of Manchester. She is the author of numerous publications using a range of genres of personal narrative, notably
Reconstructing Women's Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (1998) and
Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (2007).
Summary
Histories of the Self introduces students and researchers to scholarly approaches to diaries, letters, oral history and memoirs as sources that give access to intimate aspects of the past. Supported by case studies, it is essential reading for students and researchers interested in how personal testimony has been and can be used by historians.
