1st Edition
Theoretical Perspectives on Historians' Autobiographies From Documentation to Intervention
Introduction 1. The Humanistic Style: On the Nature of History 2. The Biographical Approach: Historians Describing the Self 3. Autobiography as Scholarship: French Ego-histoire 4. Autobiography as History: The Monographic Approach to the Self 5. Postmodernism and the Self: Autobiography as Poetry 6. Autobiography as Historiography: The Interventional Mode. Conclusions.
Biography
Jaume Aurell is Associate Professor at the Department of History at the University of Navarra (Spain). He is the author of Authoring the Past. History, Autobiography, and Politics in Medieval Catalonia (Chicago, 2012).
The project that Aurell has undertaken here is an interesting and important one, concerned as it is with exploring the relationship between the changing ways in which historians have written about their lives and the developments within history as a discipline. The emphasis on autobiography as a form of historiography adds something useful and new to this whole discussion, by turning the attention of readers to the different kinds of historical inquiry and approach that different autobiographies contain. It complements the insistence that in writing their autobiographies, historians are engaged in a negotiation with history that “subverts and complements traditional monographs, posits the ‘subjective’ as an effective form of knowledge and acknowledges the constructed nature of the text” (259).
-Barbara Caine, University of Hawai'i Press
