Shaping history : narratives of political change / Molly Andrews.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 210-219) and index.

1. History, biography, and political narratives -- Old and new stories -- The power of political narratives -- 2. Reflections on listening -- The construction of audience -- Research and desire -- Telling and 'tell-ability' -- Hearing the told and the untold -- The myth of the 'empowerment narrative' -- 3. England: stories of inspiration -- In search of stories of inspiration -- Context of the research -- Why life histories? -- Stories of radicalisation -- Keeping the faith -- Our letters -- Entering and exiting lives -- 4. The USA: narratives of patriotism -- 'My' country: The complexity of the personal pronoun -- One town's experience of patriotism during the Gulf War -- 'Good citizens' -- Patriotism and its discontents -- Kicking the 'Vietnam Syndrome' -- The frozen frame of 9/11 -- Revitalizing the national narrative -- Looking back to the time before the frame froze -- 5. East Germany. The contested story -- Background to the original project -- Constructing/constructed audience -- Oppositional activists and internal critics in the GDR -- The search for a narratable past -- Identity, imagination, and the Wall -- A question of generations -- Forgiveness and reworking the past -- 6. South Africa: told and untold stories -- South Africa, biography and the political imagination -- The 'miracle' of the TRC -- The 'talking cure'? -- Personal and historical narratives: the making of collective memory -- 7. Questions and endings -- Yearning for morality plays -- Beginnings and endings -- Individual identities and imagined communities -- Political narratives over time.

"Featuring extraordinary personal accounts, this book provides a unique window through which to examine some of the great political changes of our time, and reveals both the potential and the challenge of narrating the political world. Molly Andrews' novel analysis of the relationship between history and biography presents in-depth case studies of four different countries, offers insights into controversial issues such as the explosion of patriotism in post -9/11 USA; East Germans' ambivalent reactions to the fall of the Berlin Wall; the pressures on victims to tell certain kinds of stories while testifying before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; and the lifelong commitment to fight for social justice in England. Each of the case studies explores the implicit political worldviews which individuals impart through the stories they tell about their lives, as well as the wider social and political context which makes some stories more 'tell-able' than others." http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0729/2007006790-d.html

Print version record.

English.

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