HYM4900

History, biography and autobiography

(ART)

Barbara Caine

12 points + 2-hour seminar per week + Second semester + Clayton

Synopsis: This unit explores the writing of biography and autobiography from the late eighteenth century, looking in particular at changing ideas about subjectivity and identity, and at the relationship between biography and the novel across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will include Boswell's 'Life of Johnson'; Rousseau's Confessions; fictional autobiographies such as Jane Eyre; the affect of the development of psychoanalysis; the 'new' approach to biography by Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey; Carolyn Steedman's negotiation of autobiography in Landscape for a Good Woman; and contemporary autobiographies and biographies.

Assessment: Historiographical essay (3000 words): 35% + Essay (4000 words): 45% + Writing exercises (2000 words): 20%