Description:
1. This book is a comprehensive look at the diary as a genre, edited by a leading folklore scholar in genre studies and a leading scholar in autobiographical life writing.
2. It includes essays by all of the major scholars of autobiographical non-fiction writing.
3. This book serves as a useful cross-disciplinary tool that brings together work that has been done on the diary in a variety of disciplines over the past few decades and thus will appeal to historians, literature scholars, and anyone interested in genre studies.
Review Quotes:
"This book is an important contribution to pedagogy and knowledge. With its capaciousness and its surprises, it is much like a diary itself--adhering to a particular form, but also pressing against its conventions."--Lara Kriegel, Associate Professor of History and English; Director, Victorian Studies Program; Co-Editor, Victorian Studies, Indiana University
"This impressive collection spans a wide array of theoretical approaches, considers several cultures, and examines the diary across its history and in its many subgenres. From the lives of ordinary teenagers to the victims of the Holocaust, the diaries considered here range across the breadth of human experience. The essays are uniformly well written as one after another offers unexpected and intriguing insights. Everyone interested in diaries and genre theory will want to read this volume."--Gary Saul Morson, Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities, Northwestern University
"People have been writing diaries for more than a millennium, but only during the last fifty years have scholars given serious attention to the theory and practices of this most personal of literary forms. The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life brings together 27 essays by leading diary scholars in an informative and engaging survey. Examining examples from 12 countries on 6 continents, the authors deal with different varieties of the genre (diaries of private life, of travel, of conflict) in its handwritten, printed, and online incarnations."--Peter Heehs, author of Writing the Self: Diaries, Memoirs, and the History of the Self
"This impressive collection is an anatomy, a geography, and a history of the diary in all its incarnations, from papyrus to online. Batsheva and Dan Ben-Amos have brought major theorists and critics together with scholars working at the cutting edge of diary and new media. The result is an indespensible guide to 'The Epic of Everyday Life.'"--Craig Howes, Director, Center for Biographical Research, University of Hawaii at Mānoa
"The cream of the crop of diary experts from many different countries writing about many different aspects of the genre - this is a book to be read very carefully to learn from it, and use it as an inspiration to complement it with even more reflections from life writing scholars from even more countries."--Monica Soeting, editor of European Journal of Life Writing