Marijke Huisman

‘Monuments for the common (wo)man: Diary archives in Europe’

Life-writing documents are not difficult to find; they are part of any archive’s inventory. Nonetheless, a number of European countries have recently witnessed the rise of a new, genre-based type of archive: the diary archive. The Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (1984) in Italy was the first of this kind, and more were to follow, such as the Association pour l’autobiographie et le patrimoine autobiographique in France (APA, 1992), the Deutsches Tagebucharchiv (1998), and the Nederlands Dagboekarchief (Dutch Diary Archive, 2009). How and why did these archives come into being? What are their characteristic features, and what is the relevance of these form-based collections to gender studies? I asked Monica Soeting, co-founder of the Dutch Diary Archive, and contextualised the work of the Dutch in the broader field of European diary archives.

The Written Portrait: Biographical and Autobiographical Publishing in the Nineteenth Century

The origins of modern autobiography are generally related to processes of introspection and individualization. Marijke Huisman argues there may also have been a connection between the rise of the genre and the commercialization of the book market. Assuming that their readers were interested in the lives of famous men and women, in the second half of the nineteenth century Dutch publishers presented an increasing amount of biographical and autobiographical narratives. However, few literary authors of standing published autobiographies. Those who did were either famous people in financial difficulty or marginal writers finding a way to capitalize on their name and fame in a commercial market.