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"Lives Of": The Making of Historical...

Bejarano, Elizabeth.

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"Lives Of": The Making of Historical Figures in Britain (1580-1900).

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	"Lives Of": The Making of Historical Figures in Britain (1580-1900)./
Author:	Bejarano, Elizabeth.
Published:	Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, : 2023,
Description:	188 p.
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 84-09, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International84-09A.
Subject:	English literature. -
Online resource:	https://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=29999591
ISBN:	9798374418354

"Lives Of": The Making of Historical Figures in Britain (1580-1900).
Bejarano, Elizabeth.

"Lives Of": The Making of Historical Figures in Britain (1580-1900). - Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2023 - 188 p.

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 84-09, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2023.

This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.

I recover the history of a genre I call "lives of," which helps us understand how we create national icons, 'key figures,' and 'household names.' When sifting through early modern and eighteenth-century digital archives, I continually encountered the "lives of" ancients, holy persons, poets, artists, virtuous women, even highwaymen, necromancers, and penmanship masters. On investigating these collections, I noticed little dedication to fleshing out the subjects, and an absence of the word "biography." Instead, when reading preface after preface, I realized that "lives of" had a distinct lineage and altogether different purpose than biography, which was to make symbols for wide circulation, or historical figures."Lives of" make historical figures by linking a person to a distinctive attribute, and to others who share it. A "lives of" poets, for example, does not signal the life of any one poet, but defines "poet" with a host of representative members, and evolves this category with new members over time. This process is explicitly delineated in the para-text of early modern "lives of," where writers resourced exemplary history and hagiography to argue the "lives of" Britons (beyond royals and saints) into the English vernacular. They established a canon of British icons, lineages for fields of accomplishment, and a system to expand both. "Lives of," then, reveal the process by which history was "peopled" over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the nineteenth century, Britons had a metonymic network of historical figures unbound to any one text or object. "Shakespeare" could stand in for drama, "Newton" for physics, and "Chaucer, Donne, Dryden, and Pope," encoded a timeline of English poetry.I begin in the late-sixteenth century with the first English translation of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, by Thomas North. North argued that Plutarch's exemplary ancients would instill classical virtues in the whole commonwealth. I track the genre from this point, and show how lives-writers compiled, categorized and built a reservoir of key figures in the seventeenth-century that scaffolded national progressive histories in the eighteenth. I discuss how "biography" emerged from "lives of," and diverged to denote the life-story of an individual in the eighteenth century. "Lives of" routed, rather, out of writing and into "culture," which Matthew Arnold defined as an "atmospheric" knowledge of "the best that has been thought and said in the world." I conclude in the nineteenth century, and discuss how the exemplary figure was adapted for a society of biographically-invested readers.Arnold envisioned "culture" as the transmission of notable human achievements "from one end of society to the other." He resourced "lives of" to articulate this concept, which bridges to their contemporary iterations. Our "lives of" include the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a public monument that constellates many lives to reflect the category of "film star," but does not lead back to the life of one; or, Google's "people also search for" feature that displays categorically related persons to the one you searched. We intuit the purpose of these designs, and would not describe them as biographical. At present, however, we do not have language beyond the biographical to describe how we link figures for common understanding. In scholarship, "lives of" are typically classed as collective biography; construed as early versions of modern biography, and privileged for the information about their subjects. This project examines "lives of" outside of biography, and opens a historical inquiry about the representational possibilities for life-writing besides a life. With the study of "lives of," we glean new insights into the surge of collected lives in early modern and eighteenth-century Britain, and uncover foundational knowledge about how we make historical figures in the present.

ISBN: 9798374418354Subjects--Topical Terms:

516356
English literature.
Subjects--Index Terms:

Biography

"Lives Of": The Making of Historical Figures in Britain (1580-1900).
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245 1 0 $a "Lives Of": The Making of Historical Figures in Britain (1580-1900).
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500 $a Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 84-09, Section: A.
500 $a Advisor: Siskin, Clifford.
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520 $a I recover the history of a genre I call "lives of," which helps us understand how we create national icons, 'key figures,' and 'household names.' When sifting through early modern and eighteenth-century digital archives, I continually encountered the "lives of" ancients, holy persons, poets, artists, virtuous women, even highwaymen, necromancers, and penmanship masters. On investigating these collections, I noticed little dedication to fleshing out the subjects, and an absence of the word "biography." Instead, when reading preface after preface, I realized that "lives of" had a distinct lineage and altogether different purpose than biography, which was to make symbols for wide circulation, or historical figures."Lives of" make historical figures by linking a person to a distinctive attribute, and to others who share it. A "lives of" poets, for example, does not signal the life of any one poet, but defines "poet" with a host of representative members, and evolves this category with new members over time. This process is explicitly delineated in the para-text of early modern "lives of," where writers resourced exemplary history and hagiography to argue the "lives of" Britons (beyond royals and saints) into the English vernacular. They established a canon of British icons, lineages for fields of accomplishment, and a system to expand both. "Lives of," then, reveal the process by which history was "peopled" over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the nineteenth century, Britons had a metonymic network of historical figures unbound to any one text or object. "Shakespeare" could stand in for drama, "Newton" for physics, and "Chaucer, Donne, Dryden, and Pope," encoded a timeline of English poetry.I begin in the late-sixteenth century with the first English translation of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, by Thomas North. North argued that Plutarch's exemplary ancients would instill classical virtues in the whole commonwealth. I track the genre from this point, and show how lives-writers compiled, categorized and built a reservoir of key figures in the seventeenth-century that scaffolded national progressive histories in the eighteenth. I discuss how "biography" emerged from "lives of," and diverged to denote the life-story of an individual in the eighteenth century. "Lives of" routed, rather, out of writing and into "culture," which Matthew Arnold defined as an "atmospheric" knowledge of "the best that has been thought and said in the world." I conclude in the nineteenth century, and discuss how the exemplary figure was adapted for a society of biographically-invested readers.Arnold envisioned "culture" as the transmission of notable human achievements "from one end of society to the other." He resourced "lives of" to articulate this concept, which bridges to their contemporary iterations. Our "lives of" include the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a public monument that constellates many lives to reflect the category of "film star," but does not lead back to the life of one; or, Google's "people also search for" feature that displays categorically related persons to the one you searched. We intuit the purpose of these designs, and would not describe them as biographical. At present, however, we do not have language beyond the biographical to describe how we link figures for common understanding. In scholarship, "lives of" are typically classed as collective biography; construed as early versions of modern biography, and privileged for the information about their subjects. This project examines "lives of" outside of biography, and opens a historical inquiry about the representational possibilities for life-writing besides a life. With the study of "lives of," we glean new insights into the surge of collected lives in early modern and eighteenth-century Britain, and uncover foundational knowledge about how we make historical figures in the present.
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650 4 $a History. $3 516518
650 4 $a British & Irish literature. $3 3284317
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653 $a Eighteenth-century
653 $a Historiography
653 $a Iconography
653 $a Lives
653 $a Renaissance
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690 $a 0578
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793 $a English
856 4 0 $u https://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=29999591