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• Current

Type: fiction

Status: to read

Authors: Ruth A. Wallace Alison Wolf

Tags: theory sociology

2005-10-30

• Current

Type: fiction

Status: to read

Author: Ellen Seiter

Tags: internet children/teens/youth

2005-10-20

• Current

Type: fiction

Status: to read

Author: Sharon R. Mazzarella

Tags: online girls

2005-10-20

• Current

Type: fiction

Status: I recommend

Author: Thomas Mallon

Tags: life-writing genres

Description: A wonderfully enjoyable ramble through many, many personal diaries. Mallon groups diaries byA wonderfully enjoyable ramble through many, many personal diaries. Mallon groups diaries by their author's main purpose in writing them; people write diaries to justify their actions, to confess their flaws, to chronicle events, to record their creations, and as an escape from a physical or mental prison. Diarists can provide a minutely detailed account of a time period or of a society's transition; they can anatomize their own personality; they can record travels, work, political interactions.

The diarists described in this book range from the well-known (Darwin, Alfred Dreyfus, C.S. Lewis) to the obscure (Elizabethan-era student John Manningham, struggling artist Benjamin Haydon, fawning sycophant George Bubb Dodington, and biologist W.N.P. Barbellion, who Mallon chooses as the author of the greatest diary ever written). Mallon's assessments are always interesting and perceptive, and, when he doesn't like a diarist, cuttingly funny. This book is a keeper; you could use it to assemble a lifetime's worth of diaries to read....

2005-09-23

• Current

Type: fiction educational

Status: I recommend

Authors: Robert A Fothergill Thomas Mallon

Tags: life-writing

Description: What is the literary value of diaries? Some are merely day-to-day jottings; others provideWhat is the literary value of diaries? Some are merely day-to-day jottings; others provide a back-stage view of the worlds of are and politics; relatively few represent a conscious attempt to capture the daily essence and texture of their author’s lives, and as such can be considered works of art. In this enlightening study, Robert Fothergill deals particularly with the diaries which he believes to be of literary importance in their own right – those which were composed, more or less deliberately, as autobiographies in serial form. (cover material)...

2005-09-23