‘My Immense Mass of Manuscripts’: Fanny Burney as Archivist, Biographer and Autobiographer

2014 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Harman
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Fanny Burney

This article looks at Frances Burneys contribution to life writing through her composition, preservation and curatorship of her own personal archive and management of family papers. It charts Burneys chronic anxieties about the possible interpretation of the record that she had created, and the tension between self-expression and self-exposure which underlay her very revealing difficulties with editing, archivism and publication.

The Relationship between Seeker and Spiritual Guide as portrayed in contemporary Western Sufi Autobiographies

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-332
Author(s):  
Kate Zebiri
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
New Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Continuity And Discontinuity

This article aims to explore the Shaykh-mur?d (disciple) or teacher-pupil relationship as portrayed in Western Sufi life writing in recent decades, observing elements of continuity and discontinuity with classical Sufism. Additionally, it traces the influence on the texts of certain developments in religiosity in contemporary Western societies, especially New Age understandings of religious authority. Studying these works will provide an insight into the diversity of expressions of contemporary Sufism, while shedding light on a phenomenon which seems to fly in the face of contemporary social and religious trends which deemphasize external authority and promote the authority of the self or individual autonomy.

Spiritual and Ecclesiastical Biographies: Research, Results, and Reading, ed. Anders Jarlert. Konferenser, 94. Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, 2017, 245 pp.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 327-327
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Emeritus Professor ◽  
Royal Swedish Academy ◽  
Research Results ◽  
International Audience ◽  
Binghamton University ◽  
Sciences Sociales ◽  
The Middle Ages

The papers combined in this volume were originally presented at a conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities in Stockholm, June 11–12, 2015. The explicit purpose of this event and the subsequent volume was to expose the work of Swedish and other scholars on the genre of biographies to an international audience, reflecting on life-writing or ego-documents, emphasizing spiritual autobiographies. According to the brief bios at the end of the book, Robert Swanson, for instance, is Emeritus Professor at Binghamton University; Jean-Mark Ticchi teaches at the Centre d’Etudes en Sciences Sociales du Religieux in Paris; and Enock Bongani Zulu was lecturer at the Lutheran Theological Institute in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. The book cover is decorated with an image showing a page in Margery Kempe’s Book from ca. 1440, indicating that the focus might rest on the Middle Ages. This is only very partially the case.

Dissenting Print Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tessa Whitehouse
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Sense Of Community ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Commercial Publishing

Print culture was expanding rapidly in the eighteenth century. Yet religious literature remained the largest category of printed book and Dissenters were significant contributors to this genre. From 1695 pre-publication censorship disappeared within England so print was an important mechanism through which Dissenting identity was created and sustained. Religious works could be doctrinal, controversial, or practical and it was the latter category that had the largest lay readership. Material related to Scripture, either translated or paraphrased, accounted for much of the printed religious output but life writing and poetry were also influential. Many of the authors were ministerial and male, although the audiences for which they were writing were more varied. While it is easier to trace the uses to which material designed to educate ministers was put, there were also significant examples of Dissenters using print to fashion a wider sense of community, often through the use of non-commercial publishing models.

The life apart

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerome Boyd Maunsell
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Impact

Wharton’s early autobiographical text “Life & I” is analyzed near the outset of this chapter, which describes how it became a first draft for her autobiography A Backward Glance (1934). The chapter traces the retreating movement from disclosure to careful discretion that typified Wharton as an autobiographer, and identifies the neatness with which she compartmentalized the different areas of her experience in her fiction and in her life-writing. Wharton’s relationship with Henry James, and her portrait of him in her autobiography, are studied in detail, as is the impact of her marriage and later affair with Morton Fullerton recorded in her “love diary” “The Life Apart.” Wharton’s accounts of James during the period when he was writing his own autobiographies are also examined.

Hutton as an Author

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Whyman
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Industrial Town

Reading and writing were cornerstones of the lives of self-educated rough diamonds like Hutton. He is a perfect example of the dreaded rising author, who wrote for money, without education or status. His writings reveal new modes of authorship and the literary culture of an industrial town. Chapter 6 appraises his work by examining 70 periodical reviews of Hutton’s 15 books. Based on personal experience, they mixed history, travelogues, and life writing. Though they suited the nation’s thirst for entertainment and useful knowledge, Hutton has not been recognized as a new kind of writer, who produced unlearned books for a commercial age. His blunt style and breach of polite norms horrified the literary establishment. But his accessible prose satisfied new audiences and led to alternative yardsticks of literary taste. Hutton thus had an impact on two contrasting groups of readers, and helped put the English Midlands on the national literary map.

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