Julie M. Parsons - The Palgrave Handbook of Auto/Biography

Editors

Editors

ISBN 978-3-030-31973-1 e-ISBN 978-3-030-31974-8

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31974-8

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

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Foreword

There is a long, detailed and useful dissertation to be written on why the area of sociology represented by the Study Group should have arisen when it did. Certainly, it was not the first time such matters had been of interest to social scientists. The distinguished work of the Chicago School of sociology alone was evidence of that. However, there was a marked losing sight of this sociological tradition by the 1970s and 1980s both in the UK and the USA. A renaissance was needed and the Study Group became part of one. Its first publicationa modest, pre-internet, few-page bulletinset the tone for how it was to go about its work, describing Auto/Biography as follows:

as the activity of attempting to render a succession of narrative moments relating to a life in such a way as to make them comprehensible to others, who in turn may complement or alter them and so become part of the Auto/Biographical project Additionally, the term Auto/Biography demonstrates an alacrity to recognise that all biography has some impression of the biographer upon it and that no autobiography can be produced by an individual entirely ungoverned by the social. (Erben et al. 1992: 1)

Also, from the beginning, ordinary lives were explicitly given more attention than those publicly regarded as exceptional. The epigraph of the Auto/Biography journal is Dr. Johnsons maxim that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful no species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation than biography (Johnson 1750: 1). Further, it was not just the lives themselves that were of importance to the Study Groups endeavours but the study of those telling those lives and the meaning of the notions of biography and autobiography per se. From this first 1992 bulletin, the Study Group has not been without a continuous publication and for the last twenty-one years, under the exemplary, untiring and exceptional editorship of Andrew Sparkes, it has produced a regular academic journal containing high quality, original articles. Within its journal and through its monographs, the Study Group has accomplished the analysis and understanding of lives, identity and selfhood in numerous ways and via numerous methods: through action research, through archival research, through participant observation, through prosopography, through in-depth interview, through auto-ethnography, through case-study, through auto-fiction, through psychoanalysis, through literature and history, through art, cinema and virtual worlds and so on.

Of course, it was not only in the formative BSA Auto/Biography Study Group that interest in the study of lives in novel ways was of interest. There were additional, co-extensive developments during this time. To a degree, this biographical turn was brought about by a feeling thatsomeof the High Theory of the 1970s and 1980s was proving repetitive, too self-involved, too remote from persons and too inaccessible. By the 1980s, it was felt increasingly within parts of the social sciences and humanities that it was time to bring human actors back on the stage. As a result, there is now a large body of work within an encompassing human sciences concerned with lives and the nature of selfhood. The growing interest in autobiographical and biographical forms in terms of individuals, themes and disciplines is illustrated by the popularity of the comprehensive two-volume