History Literature And Identity

This introduction to contemporary historical theory and practice shows how issues of identity have shaped how we write history. Stefan Berger charts how a new self-reflexivity about what is involved in the process of writing history entered the historical profession and the part that historians have played in debates about the past and its meaningfulness for the present. He introduces key trends in the theory of history such as postmodernism, poststructuralism, constructivism, narrativism and the linguistic turn and reveals, in turn, the ways in which they have transformed how historians have written history over the last four decades. The book ranges widely from more traditional forms of history writing, such as political, social, economic, labour and cultural history, to the emergence of more recent fields, including gender history, historical anthropology, the history of memory, visual history, the history of material culture, and comparative, transnational and global history.

For people who live in small communities transformed by powerful outside forces, narrative accounts of culture contact and change create images of collective identity through the idiom of shared history. How may we understand the processes that make such accounts compelling for those who tell them? Why do some narratives acquire a kind of mythic status as they are told and retold in a variety of contexts and genres? Identity Through History attempts to explain how identity formation developed among the people of Santa Isabel in the Solomon Islands who were victimised by raiding headhunters in the nineteenth century, and then embraced Christianity around the turn of the century. Making innovative use of work in psychological and historical anthropology, Geoffrey White shows how these significant events were crucial to the community's view of itself in shifting social and political circumstances.

A generally acknowledged characteristic of modern life, namely the temporalization of experience, inextricable from our intensified experience of contingency and difference, has until now remained largely outside psychology's purview. Wherever questions about the development, structure, and function of the concept of time have been posed - for example by Piaget and other founders of genetic structuralism - they have been concerned predominantly with concepts of "physical", chronometrical time, and related concepts (e.g., "velocity"). All the contributions to the present volume attempt to close this gap. A larger number are especially interested in the narration of stories. Overviews of the relevant literature, as well as empirical case studies, appear alongside theoretical and methodological reflections. Most contributions refer to specifically historical phenomena and meaning-constructions. Some touch on the subjects of biographical memory and biographical constructions of reality. Of all the various affinities between the contributions collected here, the most important is their consistent attention to issues of the constitution and representation of temporal experience.

Social psychologists argue that people’s past weighs on their present. Consistent with this view, Historical Tales and National Identity outlines a theory and a methodology which provide tools for better understanding the relation between the present psychological condition of a society and representations of its past. Author Janos Laszlo argues that various kinds of historical texts including historical textbooks, texts derived from public memory (e.g. media or oral history), novels, and folk narratives play a central part in constructing national identity. Consequently, with a proper methodology, it is possible to expose the characteristic features and contours of national identities. In this book Laszlo enhances our understanding of narrative psychology and further elaborates his narrative theory of history and identity. He offers a conceptual model that draws on diverse areas of psychology - social, political, cognitive and psychodynamics - and integrates them into a coherent whole. In addition to this conceptual contribution, he also provides a major methodological innovation: a content analytic framework and software package that can be used to analyse various kinds of historical texts and shed new light on national identity. In the second part of the book, the potential of this approach is empirically illustrated, using Hungarian national identity as the focus. The author also extends his scope to consider the potential generalizations of the approach employed. Historical Tales and National Identity will be of great interest to a broad range of student and academic readers across the social sciences and humanities: in psychology, history, cultural studies, literature, anthropology, political science, media studies, sociology and memory studies.

This book examines the entire range of sacred literature produced between the sixteenth- and nineteenth century to give a comprehensive account of Sikhism. Dealing with the historical evolution of the Sikh tradition, it discuss issues like self-image, identity, and ideology.

Today, globalization, migration and political polarization complicate the individual’s search for a cohesive identity, making identity formation and transformation key issues in everyday life. This collection of essays highlights a number of the dimensions of identity, including cultural hybridity, religion, ethnicity, profession, gender, sexuality, and childhood, and explores how they are thematized in different narratives. The stories discussed are set in Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, France, Germany, Great Britain, Haiti, India, Israel, Japan, Polynesia, Norway, Romania, Spain and South Africa, emphasizing today’s international focus on identity. The majority of the contributions here focus on literary texts, while others investigate identity formations in interviews, language corpora, student reading logs, film, theatre and pathographies.

Encountering an ancient text not only as a historical source but also as a literary artifact entails an important paradigm shift, which in recent years has taken place in classical and Oriental philology. Biblical scholars, Egyptologists, and classical philologists have been pioneers in supplementing traditional historical-critical exegesis with more-literary approaches. This has led to a wealth of new insights. While the methodological consequences of this shift have been discussed within each discipline, until recently there has not been an attempt to discuss its validity and methodology on an interdisciplinary level. In 2006, the Faculty of Bible and Biblical Interpretation at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien, Heidelberg, and the Faculty of Theology at the University of Heidelberg invited scholars from the U.S., Canada, the Netherlands, Israel, and Germany to examine these issues. Under the title “Literary Fiction and the Construction of Identity in Ancient Literatures: Options and Limits of Modern Literary Approaches in the Exegesis of Ancient Texts,” experts in Egyptology, classical philology, ancient Near Eastern studies, biblical studies, Jewish studies, literary studies, and comparative religion came together to present current research and debate open questions. At this conference, each representative (from a total of 23 different disciplines) dealt with literary theory in regard to his or her area of research. The present volume organizes 17 of the resulting essays along 5 thematic lines that show how similar issues are dealt with in different disciplines: (1) Thinking of Ancient Texts as Literature, (2) The Identity of Authors and Readers, (3) Fiction and Fact, (4) Rereading Biblical Poetry, and (5) Modeling the Future by Reconstructing the Past.

Karin Tilmans is an historian, and academic coordinator of the Max Weber Programme at the European University Institute, Florence. Frank van Vree is an historian and professor of journalism at the University of Amsterdam. Jay M. Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale. --