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Global Biographies provides a comprehensive and concrete analytical framework for the use of biography as a method in global history. Over several recent decades, biography has re-emerged as a legitimate and nuanced approach to history. Nevertheless, global history, long slanted towards structural processes and the macro-analytical perspective, has made limited use of biographies beyond the purpose of adding narrative spice to larger-scale analyses. By contrast, Global Biographies shows that biography as a method of historical writing is uniquely positioned to explore human experiences and agency in global processes. Biography offers a privileged means by which to explore the relationship between individuals being in the world and socio-historical changes on a global scale. Global Biographies unpacks the historiographical and methodological relationship between biographies and global history and in doing so presents three uniquely tailored approaches to global biography. These approaches direct attention to questions central to global history concerning time and periodization, exceptionality and the normal, and space and scale. Through a diverse and carefully curated collection of chapters, each approach is conscientiously probed and reflected upon. From Icelandic communists and Jewish medical students, via Zambian Third Worldism and Albanian nationalism, to the black/white Atlantic and Australian internationalists, this volume tests the potential and pitfalls of the approaches it launches. Global Biographies offers a thorough historiographical intervention, a new set of biographical approaches to global history and a broad and critically reflective set of case studies spanning the globe.
Short biographies Alice Marriott (1824–1900) a tragedienne, best remembered for performances as Hamlet but in a long career also managed two London theatres – the Standard and Sadler’s Wells. Early career spent in Liverpool. Toured North America in 1869–70. Worked in Henry Irving and John MartinHarvey’s companies as an older performer. Professionally known as ‘Miss Marriott’, she was married to theatre manager Robert Edgar and produced three children. Emily Eliza Sanders (1832–75), daughter of actor John Sa(u)nders of Adelphi, specialised in burlesque roles
de Valera, Eammon Waldheim, Kurt Wehner, Herbert von Weizsäcker, Richard Wilson, Harold Wörner, Manfred Biographies Related entries are listed at the end of an entry by ‘[See also: …]’. An asterisk indicates a cross-reference to
4035 The debate.qxd:- 9/12/13 08:37 Page 278 9 The place of the Reformation in modern biography, fiction and the media Introduction Where does the general public acquire its knowledge of the English Reformation? From the writings of such as A.G. Dickens, Christopher Haigh, Patrick Collinson, Felicity Heal, Peter Marshall, Susan Brigden or Rosemary O’Day? I think not. The names of such novelists as Jean Plaidy, Margaret Campbell Barnes, Margaret Irwin, Philippa Gregory, Hilary Mantel, such actors and actresses as Richard Burton, Keith Michell, Paul Scofield
This essay presents the idea of James Baldwin as a freedom writer, the organizing idea of my biography in progress. As a freedom writer, Baldwin was a revolutionary intellectual, an essayist and novelist committed unfailingly to the realization of racial justice, interracial political equality, and economic democracy. While the book is still in process, this short essay narrates autobiographically how I came to meet and know Baldwin’s work, explains in critical fashion my work in relation to existing biographies, and reflects interpretively my thoughts-in- progress on this fascinating and captivating figure of immense historical and social consequence.
Gothic horror author Poppy Z. Brite wrote a biography of former Hole singer Courtney Love in 1997. What seemed an odd departure for the former actually took advantage of the Gothic valences in the latter‘s life and depictions in popular culture. The narrative gothicises Love‘s story while simultaneously repudiating and relying on Goth subculture for some of its legitimacy. This articulation of gothic literary form with Goth popular culture constitutes one traversal of Brite‘s text. Using concepts from Deleuze and Guattaris work, the essays reading of Courtney Love‘s biography is one plateau among others in an ongoing study of what I call ‘minoritarian gothic’ in popular and literary culture.
Francis Lathom was a novelist and playwright, well-known in his lifetime, but whose reputation died with him. He is best known today for his novel The Midnight Bell (1798) which formed part of the Gothic reading material on which Jane Austen‘s Northanger Abbey is founded. Lathom is described as a second or third rank Gothicist, who also wrote novels dealing with upper-class social life. This article begins with a brief biography, collated from a series of ‘facts’ that have survived about Lathom. The article debates and queries these received facts. Was he from an aristocratic family? Why did he move from Norwich to reside in a series of small Scottish villages? His life is itself considered as a narrative construct that has been amended and has accreted layers of rumour through time. The combination of secrecy and display which seem to characterise his life are the same as those found in Gothic fiction itself. These themes are explored in The Midnight Bell. A plot summary is followed with an examination of the connections between the narrative of the book and the narrative of the life of Francis Lathom.