Dictionaries of National Biography (original) (raw)
An introduction to national biographical dictionaries renovation
2021
The aim of this paper is to take part in the debate about the future of national biographies today. In this sense, we analyse national biographical dictionaries as instruments for the creation of national memory and as a foundation in the processes of building nation-states. We analyse the origin and development of national biographical dictionaries in the context of the evolution of biography. We initially observe the elements that condition dictionaries: the geographical and chronological framework in which they are developed, the criteria for selecting the personages whose biographies are to be written and for selecting biographers, the structure and sources of the biographies. At present, this model of dictionaries and national memory is being put into question by the emergence of new nationalisms and by the superseding of nations in new supranational bodies like the European Union. Finally, based on the above, we set out a proposal for renovating these works in the XXI century.
New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004
Ó Súilleabháin, Amhlaoibh [Humphrey O'Sullivan] (1783– 1838), poet and diarist, was born in Killarney, Kerry, Ireland, on 1 May 1783, the son of Donncha Ó Súilleabháin (Denis O'Sullivan; 1738–1808), a hedge schoolmaster, and his wife, Máire Ní Bhuachalla (Mary Buckley; 1748–1827), described in 1821 as a 'hugster' (small shopkeeper). He had at least three brothers and two sisters, and the family left Killarney in 1789, moving first to Waterford and then in 1790 to Rogerstown, a crossroads outside Callan, co. Kilkenny, where his father erected a schoolhouse in a single day. They finally settled in Callan where Amhlaoibh spent the rest of his life. Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin owes his place in literature to Cín Lae Amhlaoibh uí Shúilleabháin, his Gaelic diary or cín lae (it was edited by Michael McGrath and published in 1936–7 in four volumes). Use of Gaelic for contemporary writing at that time was unusual, although not unknown. Ó Súilleabháin derived his proficiency in written Gaelic from his father who taught him. The diary covers the years 1827 to 1835, and began in English as 'observations on the weather, herbs, plants, trees etc.', but the language soon changed to Gaelic (although practical, financial, and administrative details are often given in English). https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/62938
Archives, 2005
The Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) are rightly acclaimed as landmarks in the history of both scholarship and publishing. 2 Both enterprises were embarked on by men inspired by ideas of nationhood on the one hand and ideals of scholarly comprehensiveness on the other. Both have recently been subject to programmes of extensive revision and republication. After twelve years of research, the sixty volume Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford DNB) was published in September 2004, under the editorship of H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, while a new, third edition of OED
Re-imagining a Nation: The Australian Dictionary of Biography Online
European Journal of Life Writing , 2015
This essay investigates how the digital medium has recently enabled radical changes in the ways that national biography can be generated and engaged with. It takes the position that national biography, whether or not it sets out to do so, reflects how a nation views itself. The Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) has been produced continuously for more than 50 years, and has cumulatively generated a story of a nation. The nature of that collective narrative, however, is not easy to discover. Now, as a result of the ADB's recent adoption of digital formats, the potential for analysis of the biographies it contains has expanded exponentially, offering unprecedented research opportunities for investigating in new ways how the idea of nation itself has evolved in Australia.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
JRSM, 2004
was highly regarded in Denholm. He was an elder of the Congregational church and a promoter of the Total Abstinence and Horticultural societies, of the Reading Room Club, and of other institutions contributing to the welfare of the village. His formal education was limited, however, and there was certainly no tradition of academic scholarship in the ancestral families of the Murrays or the Scotts that would account for the emergence of the lexicographical prodigy that his son proved to be. James Murray is reputed to have known the letters of the alphabet by the time he was eighteen months old and to have acquired a knowledge of the written forms of Greek letters before he was seven. He is also known to have copied out on scraps of paper some lists and passages in Hebrew and Chinese written in copies of the Bible that happened to come into his parents' possession. Murray was educated first at Cavers School, the parish school of his native village. It was a 3 mile walk from Denholm, and his lifelong interest in botany may well have begun among the many wild flowers that grew beside the footpaths that took him to and from this school. In 1845 he moved to Denholm School, which took pupils from infancy until they were old enough to go out to work. He was soon recognized to be a pupil of unusual ability: he took in his stride the names of the parts of speech, the elements of geography and mathematics, and, as the only boy
Archives: The Journal of the British Records Association, 2005
The Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) are rightly acclaimed as landmarks in the history of both scholarship and publishing. 2 Both enterprises were embarked on by men inspired by ideas of nationhood on the one hand and ideals of scholarly comprehensiveness on the other. Both have recently been subject to programmes of extensive revision and republication. After twelve years of research, the sixty volume Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford DNB) was published in September 2004, under the editorship of H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, while a new, third edition of OED
Historians’ autobiographies and biographies
History Australia, 2018
Clio's Lives: Biographies and Autobiographies of Historians, edited by Doug Munro and John G. Reid, Canberra, ANU Press, 2017, xiv þ315 pp., $A50 (print), ISBN9781760461430 (print), 9781760461447 (online), Publisher's website: https:// press.anu.edu.au/publications/series/anu-lives-series-biography/clio'slives Clio's Lives is a most welcome and highly readable addition to scholarly literature on autobiography and biography. Inspired by 'the increasing though still-limited body of scholarship connecting the writing of history directly with the lives of those who write it' (1), it is based on a workshop held in Canberra during 2015. Part of the ANU Lives Series in Biography, the book brings together contributions from 13 highly regarded authors. Eleven of them are associated with Australian universities and two with Canadian universities. They discuss a quite wide variety of historians. Following the editors' introduction, the four sections focus on historians' autobiographies, historians who have defined their nation, those who have defined their discipline and collective biography of historians. Barbara Caine provides concluding reflections. Autobiography and biography are linked with intellectual and social developments. Clio's Lives not only presents the results of its contributors' research but also illuminates significant historiographical issues. The first section begins with Sheila Fitzpatrick's exploration of how, following a distinguished career as an expert on the Soviet Union's history, she turned to autobiography and writing about her deceased husband. In the process she became a historian-writer who changed her views on objectivity and subjectivity. Doug Munro and Geoffrey Gray focus on historians' recollections of childhood and young adulthood through discussing the value of three works by Fitzpatrick, John Rickard and James Walvin. Ann Moyal surveys Australian women historians' autobiographies. Mark McKenna's chapter in the second section investigates the 'invention' of Manning Clark. McKenna explains that while writing his critically acclaimed biography of Clark he had 'to somehow wrest control of the life from the extremely controlling voice of my subject' (85). Clark's autobiographies were the final expression of their author's 'fictive historical style' (100). The prominent Canadian historian Ramsay Cook, subject of Donald Wright's chapter, is clearly a less frustrating subject than Clark. Wright considers Ramsay's early life as a means of understanding his support for a Canada that was decent, open and tolerant. Alastair MacLachlan argues in the third section that while the British historians G.M. Trevelyan and Lytton Strachey had a lot in common, they differed temperamentally. 'Absent from Trevelyan's work', MacLachlan notes, 'were precisely the features that concerned Strachey: the play of personality, the texture of a life, psychic inferiority in all its CONTACT David Carment