ABSTRACT
Over the last fifteen years, some of the most valuable work in oral history has been concerned with analysing the forms of the life histories which respondents produce. Increasing attention both to the structures of such narratives and to the genres on which they draw has proved a fruitful source for understanding the ways in which people make sense of their lives. This has not so much displaced concern with the accuracy of life stories (so prominent a theme in oral history work in the 1970s), as resituated it in a new and richer context. Hesitations and silences, on the one hand, and factual inaccuracies such as transpositions in time and place, on the other, are all now seen as potentially revealing both about the historical events being recounted, and about the current understanding of the speaker.1 During the same period, there has been an extraordinary efflorescence of work in literary studies on the previously almost disregarded genre of autobiography. Oral historians and others interested in life history narratives can learn much from this work.2
