Histories of the Self

Penny Summerfield is Professor Emerita of Modern History at the University of Manchester. She is the author of numerous publications using a range of genres of personal narrative, notably Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (1998) and Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (2007).

Chapter 1. Introduction ‘Things happen in your life, you see, you never know what is going to happen’ Terminology The turn to the personal Archives Structure of the book Chapter 2. Historians’ Uses of Letters Reading letters for fact Letter-writing as a social and cultural practice: the case of war letters Gender and the letter Epistolary constructions of the self Conclusion Chapter 3. Historians and the Diary The diarist as observer The diary as a ‘technology of the self’ Gender and the diary: the making of masculinity Contradictions and incoherence The diary and the psyche The diary and privacy The public and the private Conclusion Chapter 4. Autobiography, the Memoir and the Historian Reading memoir for fact Reading for subjectivity Gendered subjectivities and models of autobiography The present meets the past Audience Rethinking the past for the present Conclusion Chapter 5. Oral History and Historical Practice Reliability and the cultural turn Public discourse, gender, and personal recall Personal memory and popular culture Evasions and silences Conclusion Chapter 6. Representativeness Historians and the sample Cultural criteria of selection The luminosity of the single case The exceptional normal Conclusion Chapter 7. Conclusion Authenticity Multiple genres Alternative genres and new directions