Narrating The Self

Narrating the Self examines the historical formation of modern Japanese literature through a fundamental reassessment of its most characteristic form, the 'I-novel, ' an autobiographical narrative thought to recount the details of the writer's personal life thinly veiled as fiction. Closely analysing a range of texts from the late nineteenth century through to the present day, the author argues that the 'I-novel' is not a given form of text that can be objectively identified, but a historically constructed reading mode and cultural paradigm that not only regulated the production and reception of literary texts but also defined cultural identity and national tradition. Instead of emphasising, as others have, the thematic and formal elements of novels traditionally placed in this category, she explores the historical formation of a field of discourse in which the 'I-novel' was retroactively created and defined.

This collection of essays by philosopher J. David Velleman on personal identity, autonomy, and moral emotions is united by an overarching thesis that there is no single entity denoted by 'the self', as well as themes from Kantian ethics and Velleman's work in the philosophy of action.

The authors of the 16 essays collected in this volume use a variety of approaches to study a broad range of what are now called 'ego-documents' from the Renaissance to the beginning of the 19th century.

Personal life narratives can serve as a rich source of new insights into the experience of human aging. In this comp;rehensive volume, an international team of editors and contributors provide effective approaches to using biography to enhance our understanding of adult development. In addition to providing new theoretical aspects on aging and biography, the book also details new developments concerning the practical use of different biographical approaches in both research and clinical work. This is a landmark volume advancing the use of narrative approaches in gerontology.

Autobiography, Gunn argues, must be reunderstood as a cultural act of "reading" the self, not as a private act of "writing" the self. Moreover, the self that is read (both by the autobiographer and the reader of autobiography) is the displayed self, not the hidden self—the self that appears in the world and can be experienced, and thereby realized, by others. Drawing on narrative theory, phenomenology, and hermeneutics, Gunn locates the literary features of autobiography in the larger anthropological context of what she calls "the autobiographical situation." An elegantly constructed interdisciplinary analysis, this book renders the hybrid genre of autobiography freshly problematic.

Michel Foucault's writing about the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish has dominated discussions of the prison and the novel, and recent literary criticism draws heavily from Foucauldian ideas about surveillance to analyze metaphorical forms of confinement: policing, detection, and public scrutiny and censure. But real Victorian prisons and the novels that portray them have few similarities to the Panopticon. Sean Grass provides a necessary alternative to Foucault by tracing the cultural history of the Victorian prison, and pointing to the tangible relations between Victorian confinement and the narrative production of the self. The Self in the Cell examines the ways in which separate confinement prisons, with their demand for autobiographical production, helped to provide an impetus and a model that guided novelists' explorations of the private self in Victorian fiction.

This work tells how narrative self-construction happens in part through the interactional power of narrative discourse, as narrators enact characteristic types of social events, with their audiences, while telling their stories.

This book is a timely study of young women’s life writing as a form of human rights activism. It focuses on six young women who suffered human rights violations when they were girls and have gone on to become activists through life writing: Malala Yousafzai, Hyeonseo Lee, Yeonmi Park, Bana Alabed, Nujeen Mustafa, and Nadia Murad. Their ongoing life-writing projects diverge to some extent, but all share several notable features: they claim a testimonial collective voice, they deploy rights discourse, they excite humanitarian emotions, they link up their context-bound plight with bigger social justice causes, and they use English as their vehicle of self-expression and self-construction. This strategic use of English is of vital importance, as it has brought them together as icons in the public sphere within the last six years. New Forms of Self-Narration is the first ever attempt to explore all these activists’ life-writing texts side by side, encompassing both the written and the audiovisual material, online and offline, and taking all texts as belonging to a unique, single, though multifaceted, project.