ABSTRACT
This chapter explains about autobiographies as new ways to represent the past, a new exploration of its meaning in renewed language and in forms that subvert historiography's prevailing structures. Historians are increasingly persuaded of autobiography's potential as a historical artifact and they use it not only to explain the world they have lived in but also to practice history and recast identity. Steedman narrates her own and her mother's life to contrast with upper-class life, with her mother's death as the mirror for her life: "Simone de Beauvoir wrote of her mother's death, said that in spite of the pain it was an easy one: an upper-class death. Carlos Eire confirms that postmodern historian autobiographers write autobiography not only to analyze, to know and to expose, but also to perform. The literary, creative and imaginative character of Rosenstone's family memoir is linked to his inclination to deal, as a historian, with nonconventional subjects.
