Writing a life : John Dwyer's narrative identity | Macquarie University ResearchOnline

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Title: Writing a life : John Dwyer's narrative identity
Related: Rethinking history, Vol. 10, Issue 1, p.109-126
DOI: 10.1080/13642520500474907
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 2006
Author/Creator: Hearn, Mark
Description: John Dwyer, a working class Sydney radical active in the period 1890-1914, felt compelled to express his being in narrative—his political aspirations and spiritual speculations, his fraught circumstances as a worker, husband and father. Dwyer's narrative is not a streamlined autobiographical statement: his surviving papers follow the upheavals and strains of his life. By exploring Dwyer's life and personal papers, this article argues that narrative identity provides a significant methodological tool for analysing the lives of historical actors, enriching traditional, materialist interpretations while avoiding the disconnection from historical experience that some critics have associated with postmodernism. The article places a stress on the dilemmas of alienation and subjectivity and explores their relationship with narrative theory.
Description: 18 page(s)
Subject Keyword: narrative identity
Subject Keyword: narrative theory
Subject Keyword: alienation
Subject Keyword: subjectivity
Subject Keyword: biography
Subject Keyword: Australian history
Resource Type: journal article
Organisation: Macquarie University. Dept. of Modern History

Macquarie University ResearchOnline