Autobiography In England Research Articles

Romantic Autobiography in England – Edited by Eugene Stelzig

Romantic Autobiography in England – Edited by Eugene Stelzig

Romantic Autobiography in England. Edited by Eugene Stelzig.Romantic Localities: Europe Writes Place. Edited by Christoph Bode and Jacqueline Labbe.

Previous articleNext article No AccessRomantic Autobiography in England. Edited by Eugene Stelzig. Romantic Localities: Europe Writes Place. Edited by Christoph Bode and Jacqueline Labbe.William C. HorrellWilliam C. Horrell Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 41, Number 4Autumn 2010 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24043638 © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

EUGENE STELZIG (ed.). Romantic Autobiography in England.

EUGENE STELZIG (ed.). Romantic Autobiography in England.

Romantic autobiography in England

Romantic autobiography in England

Romantic Autobiography in England (review)

Romantic Autobiography in England (review)

Tudor autobiography: listening for inwardness

Histories of autobiography in England often assume the genre hardly existed before 1600. But Tudor Autobiography investigates eleven sixteenth-century English writers who used sermons, a saint's biography, courtly and popular verse, a traveler's report, a history book, a husbandry book, and a supposedly fictional adventure novel to share the secrets of the heart and tell their life stories.In the past such texts have not been called autobiographies because they do not reveal much of the inwardness of their subject, a requisite of most modern autobiographies. But, according to Meredith Anne Skura, writers reveal themselves not only by what they say but by how they say it. Borrowing methods from affective linguistics, narratology, and psychoanalysis, Skura shows that a writer's thoughts and feelings can be traced in his or her language. Rejecting the search for 'the early modern self' in life writing, Tudor Autobiography instead asks what authors said about themselves, who wrote about themselves, how, and why. The result is a fascinating glimpse into a range of lived and imagined experience that challenges assumptions about life and autobiography in the early modern period.

Escaping Auschwitz: a culture of forgetting

On 7 April 1944 a Slovakian Jew, Rudolf Vrba (born Walter Rosenberg), and a fellow prisoner, Alfred Wetzler, succeeded in escaping from Auschwitz-Birkenau. As block registrars both men had been allowed relative (though always risky) freedom of movement in the camp and thus had been able to observe the massive preparations underway at Birkenau of the entire killing machine for the eradication of Europe's last remaining Jewish community, the 800,000 Jews of Hungary. The two men somehow made their way back to Slovakia where they sought out the Jewish Council (Judenrat) to warn them of the impending disaster. The Vrba-Wetzler report was the first document about the Auschwitz death camp to reach the free world and to be accepted as credible. Its authenticity broke the barrier of skepticism and apathy that had existed up to that point. However, though their critical and alarming assessment was in the hands of Hungarian Jewish leaders by April 28 or early May 1944, it is doubtful that the information it contained reached more than just a small part of the prospective victims-during May and June 1944, about 437,000 Hungarian Jews boarded, in good faith, the resettlement trains that were to carry them off to Auschwitz, where most of them were gassed on arrival. Vrba, who emigrated to Canada at war's end, published his autobiography in England nearly forty years ago. Yet his and Wetzler's story has been carefully kept from Israel's Hebrew-reading public and appears nowhere in any of the history texts that are part of the official curriculum. As Ruth Linn writes, Holocaust historiography was to follow the spirit of the court's policy at the Eichmann trial: silencing and removing challenging survivors from the gallery, and muting questions about the role of the Jewish Council in the deportations. In 1998 Linn arranged for publication of the first Hebrew edition of Vrba's memoirs. In Escaping Auschwitz she establishes the chronology of Vrba's disappearance not only from Auschwitz but also from the Israeli Holocaust narrative, skillfully exposing how the official Israeli historiography of the Holocaust has sought to suppress the story.