The shallow end of history? The substance and future of political biography

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Volumn 40, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 375-397

  Riall, Lucy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 73549110082     PISSN: 00221953     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/jinh.2010.40.3.375     Document Type: Article

References (96)

1. The phrase "the shallow end of history" is Michael Holroyd's in, "The Case against Biography," in idem, Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography and Autobiography (London, 2002), 6.
2. Idem, "What Justifies Biography [1998]," ibid., 30.
3. Nicolas Barker, "The Biographists' Tale," Times Literary Supplement, 10, Dec. 2004.
4. Jo Burr Margadant, "Introduction," in idem (ed.), The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 2000), 1.
5. Peter France and William St. Clair, "Introduction," in idem (eds.), Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography (New York, 2002), 2.
6. Roger Lockyer, "Writing Historical Biography," History Today, (November 1984), 46.
7. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936.
8. idem, Hubris (London, 1998), xi.
9. Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde (London, 1987).
10. idem, James Joyce (London, 1966).
11. Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London, 1974).
12. idem, Coleridge (New York, 1982).
13. Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy: The Time-Worn Man (London, 2006).
14. Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography (New York, 1968).
15. Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (New York, 2006).
16. Peter Burke and Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke, Gilberto Freyre: Social Theory in the Tropics (Long Handborough, 2008).
17. Holroyd, "Case against Biography," 4.
18. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (Lincoln, 1966; orig. pub. 1841), 1.
19. The Frankenstein quotation is from Richard Holmes, "The proper study?" in France and St. Clair (eds.), Mapping Lives, 12.
20. A. Lloyd Moote, "New Bottles and New Wine: The Current State of Early Modernist Biographical Writing," French Historical Studies, XIX (1996), 912.
21. Barker, "Biographists' Tales".
22. Lawrence Goldman, "A Monument to the Victorian Age? Continuity and Discontinuity in the Dictionaries of National Biography 1882-2004," Journal of Victorian Studies, XI (2006), 126.
23. Goldman, "A Monument," 112, 114, 117.
24. David Amigoni, "Distinctively Queer Little Morsels: Imagining Distinction, Groups, and Difference in the DNB and the ODNB," Journal of Victorian Studies, X (2005), 279-280.
25. Kay Ferres, "Gender, Biography and the Public Sphere," in France and St. Clair (eds.), Mapping Lives, 308.
26. Woolf quoted in Collini, "Our Island Story," London Review of Books, 20 Jan. 2005.
27. Strachey, Eminent Victorians (London, 1918), ix.
28. William N. Medlicott, "Contemporary History in Biography," Journal of Contemporary History, VII (1972), 93-94.
29. On the "new biography," see also Laura Marcus, "The Newness of the "New Biography," in France and St. Clair (eds.), Mapping Lives, 193-218.
30. Jean Glénisson, quoted in Anna Green and Kathleen Troup (eds.), The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in Twentieth-Century History and Theory (Manchester, 1999), 87.
31. Richard Cobb, "The Biographical Approach and the Personal Case History," in idem, The French and Their Revolution (London, 1998), 337, 345.
32. Ferres, "Gender, Biography and the Public Sphere," 303-305.
33. Pierre Bourdieu, "L"illusion biographique," Actes de la recherche en Sciences Sociales, 62-63 (1986), 69-70.
34. Elinor S. Shaffer, "Shaping Victorian Biography," in France and St. Clair (eds.), Mapping Lives, 115-135.
35. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).
36. Carolyn Steedman, Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain: Margaret McMillan, 1860-1913 (London, 1990).
37. Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth, a Life, a Symbol (New York, 1996).
38. Davis, Trickster Travels: In Search of Leo Africanus, a Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New York, 2006).
39. James Buchan, "Search for a Legend," The Guardian, 13 Jan. 2007.
40. Similar complaints were voiced about Zemon Davis' earlier work on Martin Guerre: See the "Forum" in the American Historical Review, XCIII (1988), 553-603.
41. Andrew Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London, 1999).
42. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin (London, 2007).
43. idem, 101 World Heroes: Great Men and Women for an Unheroic Age (London, 2007).
44. idem, Monsters: History's Most Evil Men and Women (London, 2008). Sebag Montefiore's website is at http://www.simonsebagmontefiore.com/index.aspx.
45. For more information on the series, see http://www.pearsoned.co.uk/Bookshop/subject.asp?item?7197.
46. "Introduction, "Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (New York, 2004). See also the online version-http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/info/prelims/intro/.
47. Alison Booth, "Fighting for Lives in the ODNB, or Taking Prosopography Personally," Journal of Victorian Studies, X (2005), 276.
48. Collini, "Our Island Story.".
49. Goldman, "No Smoking Dons," Times Literary Supplement, 4 Feb. 2005.
50. Richard Bosworth, Mussolini (New York, 2002).
51. Rosemary Hill, God's Architect: Pugin & the Building of Romantic Britain (London, 2007).
52. Simon Dixon, Catherine the Great (Harlow, 2001).
53. Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London, 2000; orig. pub. 1997).
54. Bosworth, Mussolini, xv, 428.
55. Dixon, Catherine the Great, 1.
56. Hill, God's Architect, 1.
57. Kershaw, Hitler, xxi.
58. Peter France, "From Eulogy To Biography: The French Academic Eloge," in idem and St. Clair, Mapping Lives, 100.
59. Kershaw, Hitler, xxi, xxiv.
60. Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven, 2007).
61. Robert Gerwarth and Riall, "Fathers of the Nation? Bismarck, Garibaldi and the Cult of Memory in Germany and Italy," European History Quarterly, XXXIX (2009), 388-413.
62. Silvana Patriarca, "Garibaldi a l'ha dosent agn: Uses and Abuses of Garibaldi in Contemporary Italy," Modern Italy, XV (forthcoming, 2010).
63. Denis Mack Smith, Garibaldi: A Great Life in Brief (New York, 1956).
64. Alberto M. Ghisalberti, Momenti e figure del Risorgimento romano (Milan, 1965), 183,189.
65. Riall, Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation State (London, 2009), 41-49. The phrase "parlar male di Garibaldi" is Curzio Malaparte's.
66. Ange Henri Blaze de Bury, Hommes du Jour, L'empereur Francois-Joseph, Garibaldi, Lord Palmerston, Le prince Schwarzenberg...(Paris, 1859), 31.
67. H. Lamarche, Garibaldi en Lombardie (Paris, 1859), 6.
68. Giuseppe Guerzoni, Garibaldi (Florence, 1882), II, 618, 638-653.
69. Alfonso Scirocco, Garibaldi: Battaglie, amori, ideali di un cittadino del mondo (Rome, 2001), viii.
70. translated into English by Allan Cameron as Garibaldi: Citizen of the World (Princeton, 2007).
71. Jasper Ridley, Garibaldi (London, 1974), xi, 637.
72. Mack Smith, Garibaldi, 9, 115.
73. Martin Clark, "Serious Celebrity," Times Literary Supplement, 7 Dec. 2007.
74. Carlyle, Heroes, 1.
75. Riall, Garibaldi, 33-58, 128-163.
76. Geoffrey Eley, "Nations, Publics and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Public Sphere," in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Boston, 1994), 289-339.
77. The reference to the "long reach" of romanticism derives from Miles Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism and the Romance of Politics, 1819-1869 (New York, 2003), 9-10.
78. Roy Foster, "The Normal and the National: Yeats and the Boundaries of Irish Writing," in idem, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It up in Ireland (London, 2001), 99.
79. idem, W.B. Yeats: A Life. I. The Apprentice Mage (New York, 1997).
80. idem, W.B. Yeats: A Life. II. The Arch-Poet (New York, 2003).
81. Riall, Garibaldi, 154-161.
82. idem, "Garibaldi e il pubblico," in Maurizio Ridolfi (ed.), Giuseppe Garibaldi: Il radicalismo democratico e il mondo del lavoro (Rome, 2008), 33-46.
83. Guerzoni, Garibaldi, II, 653.
84. Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (New York, 1994), 147-223.
85. Painter, "Representing Truth: Sojourner Truth's Knowing and Becoming Known," Journal of American History, LXXXI (1994), 480.
86. Riall, Garibaldi, 16-17.
87. Charles S. Forbes, The Campaign of Garibaldi in the Two Sicilies: A Personal Narrative (Edinburgh, 1861), 204.
88. On memoirs, see Pierre Nora, "Memoirs of Men of State: From Commyne to De Gaulle," in idem (ed.), Rethinking France: Les lieux de mémoire. I. The State (Chicago, 2001), 401-451.
89. Tim Parks, "The Insurgent," New Yorker, July 9 & 16, 2007.
90. Roland Sarti, Review for H-Italy, 2007 (www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.php?id?13748.
91. Clark, "Serious Celebrity".
92. John Davis, review of Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero, in English Historical Review, CXXIV (2009), 469.
93. Alison Booth, "Fighting for Lives," 275.
94. Ros Pesman, "Garibaldi: A Hero and His Making," Journal of Modern Italian Studies, XIII (2008), 540.
95. Kershaw, Hitler, xxvii-xxx.
96. The obvious reference concerning the charismatic leader is Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley, 1978; orig. pub. 1914), 2, 241-242.