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Robert DeMott's book, "Steinbeck's Imaginarium: Essays on Writing, Fishing, and Other Critical Matters," offers a unique and in-depth analysis of the author John Steinbeck. DeMott's lifelong scholarly study of Steinbeck allows him to provide valuable insights into the author's life and work. The book explores Steinbeck's connections to western places, his experimentation with different disciplines, his addiction to writing, and his deep appreciation for nature. DeMott's work invites readers to become active participants in our culture and engages in ongoing conversations about Steinbeck's literary contributions. [Extracted from the article]

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Copyright of Prace Filologiczne. Literaturoznawstwo is the property of University of Warsaw and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the last 4 decades, Mary Wollstonecraft has been brought from the margins of Western literary history to assume her place as a feminist foremother, radical icon, and familiar meme. As the range of disciplinary responses to Wollstonecraft's writing expands, our knowledge is deepening of her intellectual landscapes and her local and transnational networks. Diversification of expertise has also led to closer, interdisciplinary scrutiny of her works, including texts that have previously suffered neglect because of their apparent irrelevance to her feminism. Researchers increasingly recognise her transnational outlook, and this recognition has prompted intersectional reflections on her feminist legacy in the wake of Brexit and Black Lives Matter. A growing body of criticism is also revising the longstanding myth of her posthumous invisibility after the publication of Godwin's Memoirs, drawing attention to the persistent engagement with her works by key thinkers during the nineteenth century as well as her multiple afterlives in translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes Victor Paskov's story “The Ballad of Georg Henich”, following the four genre paradigms that build its unique composition. These paradigms are: ballad, story, memoir and passion. Each of them has its own way of processing the life material, its own composition and way of building the images of the main characters, its own way of posing the artistic problem, as well as a specific way of impact and social function. Despite the differences between the four genre paradigms clearly present in this book, its semantic world is emphatically unified. This unity is ensured by the fact that the idea of truth underlies all four genre models. In essence, this book observes four ways of presenting and evaluating the truth, which are so organically intertwined that they form a unique, harmonious and emotionally convincing whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work is an attempt at investigating Ham ek umr se vāqif haiṁ ('I have known for a lifetime,' 1989), a memoir by Hariśaṅkar Parsāī (1924-1995), commonly deemed as the most outstanding postcolonial Hindī literary satirist (vyaṅgyakār). The study aims to explore the narrative strategies as well as the socio-cultural and ideological ends pursued by Parsāī in crafting this work. More precisely, much attention is given to the philosophical views of the writer, who consciously decided to avoid the autobiographical form in his writings. Indeed, he deemed the autobiography (ātmakathā) as a genre devoid of any social commitment. On the contrary, he considered memoirs as texts more suitable for conveying ideas on socio-cultural and political issues. Apart from this, considerable emphasis will be placed on the narratives Parsāī developed in this memoir in order to legitimize the value of the satirists, who are authors somehow marginalized by Hindī literary criticism. In order to focus on this issue, the study will engage with the analysis of Parsāī's aesthetic relationship with the representatives of Nayī Kahānī, the major Hindī literary movement of the 1950s and 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Impossibilia: Revista Internacional de Estudios Literarios is the property of Impossibilia: Revista Internacional de Estudios Literarios and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article examines the most notable manifestations of the representation of Kurzeme in the books depicting the childhood memories of two writers belonging to this cultural-historical region of Latvia: Bērnība, es sveicu tevi (1968) by Herberts Dorbe (1894-1983) and Cūkgans (1936, 1956) by Andrejs Kurcijs (1884-1959). The study outlines the significance of both writers in Latvian culture and especially children's literature in the first half of the 20th century and the specifics of childhood memoirs, their connection with aspects of regional literature. The main focus of the article is on the identification and interpretation of the main features of the representation of Kurzeme in accordance with regionality indicators accepted in the theory and practice of literary studies. From their wide range, in the books of H. Dorbe and A. Kurcijs, the most noticeable are specific and detailed accounts of the geography of Kurzeme, descriptions of significant landscapes, and, to some extent, depictions of language, customs, historical events and personalities. The narrative of childhood memories, in accordance with the specifics of the genre, reveals the aspects of local distinctiveness that had a special importance in the writers' experience, for example, the neighbourhood of the childhood home and school, landscapes of various sections of the road, etc. A special landmark of Kurzeme in the memories of both authors is the Baltic Sea as a significant marker of this region, which is attributed symbolic importance of the majesty of nature, the vastness of the world and freedom. The memories of both writers also record urban impressions (descriptions of streets, houses, various details, etc.), however, the book by H. Dorbe contains more detailed portrayals of cities, specifically Piltene and Ventspils. Geographical landmarks form an important part of the memory recounting of writers H. Dorbe and A. Kurcijs, not only representing the setting of the action, but also having the role of driving the plot. The portrayal of the local distinctiveness is dominated by concreteness, the accuracy of the description of details, and the loving attitude of the writers towards their native region, its traditions and people. The study of memoirs from the perspective of regional discourse allows us to establish that autobiographical prose, particularly books of childhood memories, constitutes a special segment of texts in Latvian literature, the content of which correlates with the author's biography, and in which the representation of Kurzeme is included as a record of life impressions of a particular era, so they can become a wider source of knowledge and field of interpretations for cultural studies of a particular region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early Russian reception of the Scottish writer James Hogg (1770—1835), known in his homeland as an interpreter of folk ballads and the author of “The Confession of a Justified Sinner” (1824) — a complex work, which laid the foundation for the theme of multiple personality disorder in English literature is comprehended in the article for the first time. It has been suggested that the first Russian to hear about Hogg and his works was A. I. Turgenev, who visited W. Scott in Abbotsford in August 1828. The materials of the Russian periodicals of the 1830s (“Library for reading”, “Northern Bee”, “Telescope”, “Moscow Observer”), which reported facts about the life and work of Hogg, were comprehended. It is noted that the authors of a number of articles (most of them published without a signature and under kryptonyms) were significant critics and publicists of the era — O. I. Senkovsky, N. A. Polevoy, N. I. Nadezhdin. It was established that in the 1830s, fragments from Hogg’s memoir about the life of W. Scott in Abbotsford “The Domestic Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter Scott” (1834), as well as a fragment from the book “Noctes Ambrosianae” (1802—1835), attributed to Hogg, but in reality a collective work of J. Wilson, J. G. Lockhart, Hogg and W. Maginn were translated into Russian. The analysis of publications about Hogg in periodicals and in the fourteenth volume of the Encyclopedic Lexicon (1838) revealed inaccuracies in the presentation of biographical facts, the tendency of Russian publicists to uncritically perceive the subjective assessments of the Hogg-memoirist, largely due to his desire to emphasize his own literary significance. It is noted that, introducing Hogg as a follower of Burns and a friend of Scott, the authors of articles in Russian periodicals did not pay due attention to Hogg’s creative individuality, the originality of his creative heritage, as a result of which the late period of his literary biography (late 1810s — mid-1830s), associated with the creation of “The Confession of a Justified Sinner” and a number of other significant works, remained unnoticed against the background of early works associated with reliance on folk songs.

(127) Tobias then goes on to dissect the name equivalence of the narrator and the historical author Sebald. Tobias takes cue from Philippe Lejeune's theory of autobiography, according to which the author, narrator, and protagonist share the same name (9). (117) In her final chapter, Tobias discusses The Author in pseudo-memoirs through the lens of W.G. Sebald's I Schwindel. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Bulgarian Language & Literature / Bulgarski Ezik i Literatura is the property of Az Buki National Publishing House and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This case study of Québécois scholar Pierre Anctil reveals the unusual intellectual trajectory of a social anthropologist who has translated an assortment of material from Yiddish into French: poetry, memoirs, literary history, and archival material. He has drawn on these sources, previously unavailable to scholars unfamiliar with the language in which they were written, and has made use of them to construct a fresh historical narrative. The article examines his motives for translating, along with the wide-ranging impact of his work in literary and scholarly circles, as well as in the public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The memoirs of Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla, a countrywoman from the North of Bukovina, occupy an important place in what regards the literature dedicated to the Stalinist deportations of the post-war period. The detailed analysis of the facts depicted, the thorough investigation of the historic conditions of the events that make up the epic weaving of the narrative, the scrupulous examination the Siberian course of a family cut short by the war in all the stages of its absurd deportation lead to the conclusion that Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla's memoirs represent a document of utmost importance for the understanding of the national, social and political processes that Bukovina had to pass through in the 20th century. Thus, these memoirs posses a triple value: historical, literary and philological, constituting an important source of information for the historiography of Bukovina and also a vast material for such academic disciplines as Linguistics or Literary History. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Halit Ziya (Uşaklıgil) explained his thoughts on Tanzimat literature in his work named, “Kırk Yıl” in which he wrote his literary memoirs. One of main elements that draw attention in the work is the author’s observations and opinions about the literary circles he visited here, after he went from Izmir to Istanbul. The author gathered those who worked on the path of classical literature under the roof of Muallim Naci School and those who worked on the path to new litrature under the roof of Namık Kemal School. Muallim Naci evaluated and his environment from a negative point of view. He stated that the writers belonging to this school produced Works within the framework of Divan literature. He accused the Muallim Naci School of having a narrow World view, which was devoted to the past. H eapproached Ebuzziya Tevfik, Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem and Samipaşazade Sezai with a positive perspective and praised these authors for giving Works within the framework of new literature. He depicted Ebuzziya Tevfik as kind and gentleman. He highlighted Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem in terms of lifestyle, wordview and literary criticism. Halit Ziya drew attention to the fact that Sami Paşazade Sezai is a powerful pen in prose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the analysis and interpretation of Witold Gombrowicz's short story: Memoirs of Stefan Czarniecki from the volume Pamiętnik z okresu dojrzewania [Memoirs from Time of Immaturity] 1933 (included after the Second World War in the volume Bakakaj [English translation: Bacacay]). The author interprets the story as narrative about life with the stigma that results from the social effects of anti-Semitism. At the same time however, he shows that the conceptualizations of "race" are often very clearly combined with the considerations about masculinity and effeminacy of the main hero. The author shows - referring to the historical works and theoretical and literary criticism (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) that "effiminacy" combines narratives about Jewishness and male homosexuality in a complex way, which at the same time constitutes the aporia of Gombrowicz's text and queer construction of identity of the main hero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from Traga-me a cabeça de Lima Barreto! [Bring Me Lima Barreto's Head!] (2017), a monologue made up of fragments of the author's memoirs, fiction and journalism, this article explores the effects of the play in illuminating the first decades of the 20th century in Brazil, which have fallen into obscurity both in national history and in literary historiography. We show the links between racialism, eugenics and bio politics in public policy oriented to the social and cultural modernization of the Brazilian state. The aim is to expose Brazilian racism as a structuring premise of modern Brazilian society and the effects of racism on the work and especially the life of Lima Barreto. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Social Sciences Research / Sosyal Bilimler Arastirmalari Dergisi is the property of ODU Journal of Social Sciences Research and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Despite Rhys's refusal to have a biography written about her, her own life has been the subject of quite a number of memoirs, biographies or portraits: from David Plante's early, personal and subversive reminiscences of his time and work with her at the end of her life, to the perhaps more consensual Jean Rhys: Life and Work by Carole Angier in 1990, to the more recent memoirs by Alexis Lykiard, Jean Rhys Revisited (2000) and Jean Rhys: Afterwords (2006) or the latest, The Blue Hour by Lilian Pizzichini (2009). These biographies and memoirs may be considered as transmission lines, contributing to the aura of a writer no less than other pieces of criticism. Because Rhys's fiction was considered as autobiographical, the point of writing biographies should precisely be to differentiate facts from fiction. I shall ponder in this article on the reasons why some biographies are considered as 'good' and others 'bad', what makes a biography a 'worthy' recording of a writer's life and work. This overview of Rhys's biographies will be an opportunity to reflect on the evolution of the genre itself and its ability to transmit personality truthfully in a post-modern era when the pitfalls and drawbacks of the genre have been extensively debated by biographical theoreticians and when truth and personality seem more than ever like two very complex and perhaps inimical notions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Octavian C. Tãslãuanu (1 February 1876-23 October 1942) is one of the leading Transylvanian representatives of the "steel" generation, whose publishing activity was entirely devoted to the ideal of cultural and political unity for all Romanians. This scientific endeavor is meant to be a restitution, as his personality as well as his works have been repeatedly affected by ruthless censorship, either during his life or after his death. Octavian C. Tãslãuanu is relatively unknown, while numerous poorly documented articles, signed by different authors, introduced many inaccuracies in regards to his life and work. This eventually affected the research and created confusion among readers, as it is currently difficult to find the undistorted truth about this patriot and his place in the history of Romanian literature. The overwhelming actuality of his writings requires a full re-edit of his memoirs and oeuvre for the young generation, thus "reconsidering him" and establishing him as a true contemporary. The author of this paper used ideas, fragments and images from the bio-bibliographical overview of the personality and work of Octavian C. Tãslãuanu, which he has compiled as coordinator of a series of memoirs dedicated to the great man, scheduled to be published in 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Bulgarian Language & Literature / Bulgarski Ezik i Literatura is the property of Az Buki National Publishing House and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article regards the advantages and setbacks of being bilingual when it comes to foreign women teachers and writers who contributed to the Bulgarian national project from the 1860s to the 1920s. They are the Serbian teacher Rahil Barak Dushanova (1845-1888), the Czech teacher and journalist Bogdana Iraskova Hiteva (1844-1929), and the second-generation Bulgarian émigré in Romania Evgenia Mihailova Vassileva (1852-1926) who was a poet, journalist, and writer. First, the article distinguishes the types of bilingualism for each case, attributing a coordinate type to the women teachers Bogdana Hiteva and Rahil Dushavova, and a subordinate one to Ekaterina Vassileva, who did not feel confident in Bulgarian and wrote her texts in Romanian or French. Then the paper follows the biographical path of each of these women in order to distinguish whether her positioning in the receiving country displays a strategy of adaptation and inclusion into Bulgarian social and cultural life, and at what cost it was achieved. However, as it concerns the Bulgarian literary history, the identity of a bilingual woman writer has fewer chances for posthumous inclusion into the literary canon due to her unstable and transitive identity. The conclusion of the paper is that those women who managed to claim sufficiently their newly achieved and sustained Bulgarian identity have better chances for future remembrance. Yet, large parts of their writings need the applicationof a new and non-nationalistic perspective, which could acknowledge better their specific contribution to both Bulgarian literature and that of their birthplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Slawistik is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Colloquia Humanistica is the property of Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Slavic Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article provides information on the circulation of handmade news item in 18th century, impact of press and newspapers and level of elites for fiction literature. Topics include collections of short stories, reading authentic memoirs of protagonists and rise of an avalanche of stories, facts and songs.

Memoirs are pesky things to pin down. They are not solely rooted in fact nor are they purely works of fiction. Lurking somewhere between the two, a memoir represents what the author chooses to share from his or her past, as well as how he or she chooses to share it. Neuroscience research on memory beckons us to rethink our understanding of the tone, structure, and creation of Hemingway's Paris memoir. Specifically, this paper explores three dimensions of memory, including Long Term Memory (LTM) fluidity and context, autobiographical memory and storytelling, and misinformation memory. The closing segment of the paper summarizes the elements of memory confusion that pervade A Moveable Feast and considers implications for future scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Written in the style of a memoir, Una's graphic novel, Becoming Unbecoming, takes readers on a poignant journey with a young girl who experiences silence, shame and blame after being subjected to male sexual violence. The protagonist's story is played out against the backdrop of the rapes and murders committed by the notorious Yorkshire Ripper. This paper examines the text's multilayered narrative, which uses a range of graphic strategies and artistic styles to challenge its readers to make meaning, fill in the gaps and piece together their own version of events. The text's fragmented and disconnected sequences mimic the nature of traumatic memory, and the shifting linguistic–visual narration moves between fact, story, experience and emotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though Chateaubriand is known as a great writer of exile, his memoirs present many instances of homecoming: his own in 1800, and those of Louis XVIII, his brother the comte d'Artois, and the remaining émigrés in 1814. This article reads Chateaubriand's treatment of these homecomings in his memoirs alongside his political writings of 1814-18 to consider how Chateaubriand presents them as moments of national identity-crisis, and retrospectively adopts in the memoirs some of the very positions he had rejected under the Restoration. It also considers these themes in the newspaper Le Conservateur, whose founding in 1818 coincided with the final departure of the foreign troops from France. Using the central concept of "repatriation," I consider how Chateaubriand presented himself as the apostle of a unified image of Frenchness; yet how that image was undermined by his own collaborators, who consistently underscored the irremediably fractured state of the fatherland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autofiction occupies a liminal space between fiction and nonfiction that requires continuous adjustments to the reading process as the novel vacillates between biographical fact and outright fiction. “Post-truth” may have been Oxford Dictionary’s 2016 Word of the Year, but the popularity of autofiction demonstrates that, while readers like to toy with the idea of truth being in the eye of the beholder, they ultimately maintain a line of demarcation between fact and fiction. Despite poststructuralist assertions to the contrary, there remains a difference in effect between a factual story and a fictional one. On the other hand, readers’ ability to navigate autofiction’s narrative intricacies demonstrates the wider cultural acceptance of those same poststructuralist ideas. Autofictions consciously play with readerly expectations about memoir and fiction, thwarting both, thereby simultaneously calling into question, and making a case for, the importance of distinguishing between fact and fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Wołowiec argues that Stanisław Pigoń's work, which spans literary scholarship and criticism, feuilletons and memoirs, should be read as a ideologically coherent entity. Pigoń is mostly known as a positivist literary scholar with a lasting reputation as the most outstanding specialist on Mickiewicz, but Wołowiec portrays him as a paradigmatic twentieth-century ideologue who, through his (academic) work, actively participates in the ideological and political debates of his time. Wołowiec also outlines Pigoń's antirevolutionary and nationalistic cultural programme aiming at integrating the Polish peasantry (the people) into the sphere of national culture, understood in essentialist (primordial) terms. The article also takes up the problem of Pigoń's anti-Semitic engagement in the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author presents a memoir of his involvement with comic books, anime, and science fiction films. He mentions his interest in manga and other foreign comics, his role in the growth of interest in anime in the U.S., and his participation in science fiction film societies, mostly in Los Angeles, California.

The article explores the history and reception of memoirs written by dissidents of the Soviet Union. The author reflects on gaps in Soviet historiography and Russian autobiographical themes such as prisons and exile. Books noted include "My Testimony" by Anatoly Marchenko, "A Childhood in Prison" by Petr Yakir, and "To Build a Castle" by Vladimir Bukovsky.

This paper examines the recent appearance of several 'anti-heroic' memoirs of the South African 'Border War' written by conscripts. The use of the medical diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in these writings is critically examined. The memoirs reveal how difficult it is to articulate memories of contemporary war without drawing on a medical explanation. The South African memoirs also demonstrate the ambiguous role that the diagnosis of PTSD plays in, on the one hand, enabling the authors to speak about their experiences, while, on the other, providing an opportunity for them to distance themselves from the ethical implications of their own involvement in the war. The paper concludes that the tension within the identity of victim-perpetrator is perhaps too easily collapsed into simple victimhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the nature of late Ottoman provincial intercommunal interactions and affiliations as they appear in the memoir of Hovhannes Cherishian (1886–1967), a shoemaker from late Ottoman Marash (present-day Kahramanmaraş, in southeastern Turkey). The paper is situated within the larger discourse of “untold histories” that historians have begun to address in revising the deeply ingrained post-Ottoman nationalist historiographies that dominate both academic and popular discourses. Conventional historiographies have represented former late Ottoman subject communities (e.g., Greek, Jewish, Armenian) as insulated and homogenous proto-nation-states. In the revisionist historiography, the late Ottoman Armenian voice, especially the provincial one, has been noticeably absent. Here I utilize Cherishian's memoir to examine the life and thoughts of one late Ottoman Armenian provincial subject. I focus especially on his treatment of intercommunal interactions in Anatolia and present-day Syria between 1897 and 1922. His accounts of these often extended intercommunal interactions, affiliations, and networks are characterized by intercommunal and interpersonal openness, sympathy, intimacy, and pleasure, even as he presents them side-by-side with descriptions of deportation and death at the hands of the late Ottoman state. I develop the idea of what I call “provincial cosmopolitanism” to conceptualize and represent the disposition, affinity, and process of identity formation that enabled Cherishian to create and operate these interpersonal relationships and networks that propelled his life, a historical condition to which we are not currently privy in most historiographical accounts of the late Ottoman period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]