Product Description: This book shows how autobiography has been ignored, and shows that it has always become important in times of revolution.

Product Description: Analysis of the autobiographies of Ben Franklin, Louis Sullivan, Jane Addams, Emma Goldman, William Carlos Williams, Edward Dahlberg, Richard Wright, and Gertrude Stein.

Product Description: Book by Fichtelberg, Joseph

Product Description: All autobiographers are unreliable narrators. Yet what a writer chooses to misrepresent is as telling -- perhaps even more so -- as what really happened. Timothy Adams believes that autobiography is an attempt to reconcile one's life with one's self, and he argues in this book that autobiography should not be taken as historically accurate but as metaphorically authentic...read more

Seven toys who have enjoyed a peaceful existence in an attic trunk are threatened when the owners of the house decide to clean out the attic

Examines Hemingway's methods of self-mythologizing and argues that the anecdotes in 'A Moveable Feast' were written shortly before his death, not in the 1920s as he claimed

Product Description: Stanley Fish opens the collection with a persuasive argument for the role of intention and biography. Michael McKeon, Gordon Turnbull, and Jerome Christensen are concerned with the late eighteenth--and early nineteenth-century English cultural discourse that gave rise to the nearly simultaneous emergence of literary biography, Romantic sensibility, and reflexive human consciousness...read more

Product Description: Pilgrims to the Wild is a survey of American writers who have responded to their encounters with the natural world. Ranging in its treatment from Thoreau’s important but neglected essay, 'Walking,' to the exuberant letters of the young artist Everett Ruess (who disappeared in the Escalante canyonlands), this is a broadly based exploration that brings to bear Eastern and Western classical philosophy, as well as contemporary critical theory, on a distinctive tradition of American Writing—those works concerned with the human relationship to the nonhuman world...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Sacred Estrangement analyzes certain works by important American writers and thinkers in the context of the "rhetoric of conversion." Such analysis is especially valuable because it provides a reliable index of the relationship between the self and larger communities. Traditionally, "conversion" has served a socializing function, signifying that one has come into alignment with certain linguistic, behavioral, and cultural expectations. The socialization process is particularly apparent in the Christian conversion narratives of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries: by publicly testifying to a conversion experience, believers became empowered members, not only of God's elect community but also of a local population. As modern autobiography developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Christian pattern was secularized and individualized. Conversion became a model for many kinds of psychological change. With the coming of the twentieth century, however, the authors upon whom Peter Dorsey focuses, including William and Henry James, Henry Adams, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright, radically revised conversion rhetoric. If conversion had traditionally linked the search for illumination with the search for a defined social role, these writers increasingly used conversion as an index of estrangement from mainstream America. Dorsey documents this profound change in the way American intellectuals defined the "self," not in terms of personal orientation toward or away from a given community, but as a resistance to such an orientation altogether, as if social forces by their "nature" were a threat to personal identity. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Departing from previous discussions of literary nonfiction in terms of its being literature or journalism, this new study treats literary nonfiction as autobiography, examining a large body of work in terms of autobiographical theory...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This study examines how Henry James transformed the non-fiction genres of travel writing, literary criticism and autobiography.

Eight American authors draw on their own works to describe the creative process involved in writing a memoir

Product Description: In 1911, at the age of 68, Henry James began A Small Boy and Others with the intent of writing a memoir of his brother William and other members of his family. Within months, however, James's interest in others was replaced by a desire to trace his personal development...read more

Product Description: This is a reassessment of the practice and theory of autobiography in the 19th century, using contemporary and more recent interpretative approaches. It deals with a range of authors, canonical and non-canonical: Romantics - Wordsworth, de Quincey and Leigh Hunt; intellectuals - Carlyle, Mill and Newman; women writers - Wollstonecraft, Eliot, Martineau and others; late threshold figures "Mark Rutherford" and Conan Doyle; and Americans Mary Chestnut and Walt Whitman...read more

Offers a new interpretation of Clemens' life and work and explores the profound needs that led him to create the Twain persona

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Seven toys who have enjoyed a peaceful existence in an attic trunk are threatened when the owners of the house decide to clean out the attic (view table of contents)

Offers a look at the historical context of Maya Angelou's autobiography (view table of contents)

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