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y separately published work icon Life Writing after Empire anthology   criticism  
Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 Life Writing after Empire
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Contents

* Contents derived from the London,
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England,
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United Kingdom (UK),
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Western Europe, Europe,
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Routledge , 2017 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
‘National Awakening’, Autobiography, and the Invention of Manning Clark, Mark McKenna , single work criticism
'In the late twentieth century, Australian historian Manning Clark (1915–1991) was the nation’s leading historian and public intellectual. Clark published a six-volume history of Australia (1962–1987) and was one of a vanguard of intellectuals striving to articulate a new Australian nationalism in the wake of the British Empire’s decline. His best-known volumes of autobiography were published in quick succession. Puzzles of Childhood (1989), which tells the story of his parents’ lives and the ‘nightmares and terrors’ of his childhood, and Quest for Grace (1990), which begins from his days as a student at Melbourne and Oxford universities in the 1930s and ends just as the first volume of A History of Australia is published in 1962. In addition to these two volumes, Clark’s autobiographical writings extended to reflections on historical writing, essays, speeches and interviews. This paper argues that all of Clark’s writing (including his histories) can be seen as inherently autobiographical. As Clark remarked, ‘everything one writes is a fragment in a gigantic confession of life’. Clark’s autobiographical writings point not only to the notorious unreliability of autobiography but also to much larger questions, such as the relationship between autobiographical truth and his invention as a national figure, and the author’s right to own their life story. Finally, perhaps more than any other Australian intellectual of his generation, Clark’s autobiographies narrate his life story as an allegory of national awakening. ...'
'This Union-Jacked Time : Memories of Education as Post-Imperial Positioning, Astrid Rasch , single work criticism

'The end of the British Empire saw profound changes to collective narratives of identity in former colonies—changes which did not leave individuals untouched. This essay examines how individuals use their autobiographical memories of education to position themselves within the new discursive and aesthetic frameworks of their postcolonial societies. Australian historian Russel Ward and Canada-based Barbadian novelist Austin Clarke both wrote their autobiographies in the 1980s and their texts reflect the after empire context in strikingly similar ways. As they recall their education, they link a curriculum focused on Britain to alienation from their local surroundings and associate their adoption of English speech patterns with snobbery. Clarke and Ward employ different positioning strategies in terms of their former selves, suggesting either their complete immersion in an imperial world view or their budding criticism of the curriculum. However, both authors signal to their postcolonial audiences that they now reject the politics of their schooling and by extension the imperial system which it is retrospectively made to represent.'

Source: Abstract.

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