Carolyn Steedman

Steedman's book really challenges histories of working class folks by taking her own life and her mother's life and tracing them with some lenses of psychoanalysis and also readings of class consciousness and showing how disconnected those experiences are from dominant narratives about working class life. It sort of feels all over the place, but every part of it reads towards her argument and it's really compelling in the ways she mines her own experience for these pieces. I can't quite explain it, but I found it to be a really interesting, compelling read and I definitely recommend it.… (mehr)

I'm not a historian, and thus not the target audience, and hence this review is highly subjective. I felt that most of the essays in this book revolved around literary-theory-type ramblings, only rarely getting to the bone of the matter. It is not a work focussing on the archive as such, I'd rather say it is about the process of writing history and what history-writing is and means and what historians say and should be saying. The primary focus, I guess, is on the development of historiography from the nineteenth century, and what insights can be gleaned by returning to those 19C historians. I didn't find this particularly useful, but others undoubtedly will.… (mehr)