Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

CiteULike is a free service for managing and discovering scholarly references - click here to get started.

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Qualitative Research
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by King, N.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Plotting the lives of others: narrative structure in some recent British autobiography

Nicola King

University of the West of England, UK, Nicola.King{at}uwe.ac.uk, Nicolaking{at}aol.com

Some recent British memoirs or autobiographies are discussed, focusing on narrative structure, using theories developed by Bernstein, Ricoeur, Cavarero and others to explore the relationship between `life', `story' and the effects of emplotment. Writing the lives of others, it is argued, always has an ethical dimension, as the writer is able to take advantage of the hindsight not available to his or her subjects — here parents or grandparents. The means by which the writers concerned negotiate this privilege of hindsight, and the implications of the narrative choices they inevitably have to make, are explained.

Key Words: autobiography • emplotment • hindsight • interpretation • memoir • narrative theory • structure

Qualitative Research, Vol. 8, No. 3, 339-346 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1468794106093630
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?