Auto/Biography and Reputation Politics by Gernalzick, Nadja; Hagen, Edwina; Icks, Martijn;

Short description:

Auto/Biography and Reputation Politics brings together for the first time these two research fields to demonstrate that life writing is reputation politics. 

Long description:

Auto/Biography and Reputation Politics brings together for the first time these two research fields to demonstrate that life writing is reputation politics. The innovative collection is postdisciplinary, comparative, and transnational, with contributions on works from originally seven languages. The authors show how studies in reputation politics and reputation management gain from theory and methodology in research on life writing and how studies in life writing benefit from attention to criteria and terms developed in studies of reputation politics. The genres of the life writing treated include autobiography, autofiction, autosociobiography, autobiographical novel, biofiction, biography, diary, historiography, littérature engagée, political memoir, satire, scholarly article, and presidential campaign speech, and range across historical periods from the Byzantine Empire in late antiquity, early nineteenth-century Netherlands and later nineteenth-century Germany, Greece and the Ottoman Empire, twentieth-century Britain and India to the United States, France, and Russia in the twenty-first century. In each contribution, principles of reputation politics studies are applied to the fiction and non‑fiction features of life writing across various genres and their conventions. Chapters attend to narrative strategies, public relations, gendering, racialization, and class politics. The contributions discuss how reputations are created, changed, destroyed, or saved in auto/biographies and how life writing reputations interact with strategies of personal politics and political programs.

Table of Contents:

Life Writing Reputations: Introduction

Nadja Gernalzick

1 Mobilizing the Imperial Writer: Reputation Strategies in Zakhar Prilepin’s Auto/Biographical Writing and Transmedia Self-Fashioning, 2017–2023

Thomas Fritz Maier

2 Political Memoirs and Diaries in the United Kingdom since 1900: Genre, Paratext, and Reputation Management

Richard Toye

3 Political Autobiography in the Postrevolutionary Netherlands: Refashioning Reputations in the Early Nineteenth Century

Edwina Hagen

4 The Demon and the Prostitute: Justinian and Theodora in Procopius’s Biographical Secret History from Sixth-Century CE Constantinople

Martijn Icks

5 Character Attacks in Biographies of U.S. Presidents: Psychological Mechanisms

Eric Shiraev   6 Narrating the Authentic Self: Campaign Speeches as Political Autobiography in the United States

Jennifer Keohane

7 Scandals, Auto/Biography, and Reputation Politics: Developing an Interdisciplinary Analytical Framework with Examples from the United States and Germany

André Haller and Hendrik Michael

8 Misreading Life Writing: The Schliemann Reputation Transactions between Archaeology, Psychiatry, and Auto/Biography, 1880s to 1990s

Nadja Gernalzick

  9 Reclaiming Chastity and Literary Repute in Maitreyi Devi’s Life Writing It Does Not Die: A Romance (1976/1994)

Nisha Ghatak

10 Biofiction, Minor Literature, and Reputation Management in Cristina García’s King of Cuba (2013)

Nadjiba Bouallegue     11 The Autosociobiographical Politics of Édouard Louis: Reputation Management between littérature engagée and Creating a Self Kathrin Engelskircher  

Auto/Biography and Reputation Politics: Prospects for Joint Research

Julia Novak

“Epitaph” by Kateřina Tučková: An Introduction

Nadja Gernalzick and Martina Klicperová-Baker

Epitaph

Kateřina Tučková