Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses historical practice that focuses on letters as narratives that deploy experience, emotion, fantasy and imagination in the construction of the self in relation to an addressee. It explores historians' various understandings of departures from factual accuracy in autobiography, and their responses to the idea that the present moment in which, and the audiences for whom, the memoirist is writing, shape what is written. The book also explores historians' engagement with the relationship of public discourse and popular culture to oral narratives, and discusses the different ways in which historians regard silences and evasions in oral testimony. It focuses on the uses that historians have made of personal narratives–their methodologies–rather than on the historiography of the specific issues that they address.