ABSTRACT
Interventional autobiographies also emerged in the context of the growing recognition of the subgenre of historiography, considered marginal among historians until the 1970s. Autobiography gives historians the opportunity to place one's self noticeably into one's critical writing, as some of the key contributors to certain subdisciplines, such as Carolyn Steedman, Geoff Eley and Natalie Davis (social history), Gabrielle Spiegel (history of historiography), Dominick LaCapra (intellectual history) and William Sewell (social-linguistic history) have shown. This chapter aims to answer Davies' "intriguing question" on this new historical-autobiographical genre and to try to understand the "paradoxical impression" these new literary artifacts give to readers. Thus, they find intellectual autobiography a privileged way to think through this history. Other interventional historians have taken advantage of their autobiographical writings to comment on their field's identity and shifts. These autobiographical accounts help the reader to understand the intellectual changes that have taken place in the discipline itself as they propose new paths for history.
