Chapter 2 introduces the field site. It provides a historic overview of Heyang village and provides “a ‘guided tour’” of the village’s principal tourist area, the ancient heritage dwellings complex, guminju, a nationally recognized and protected heritage site. It takes a brief detour into the village’s history, stretching as far back as the Five Dynasties era (AD 907-960), the period in which the village was supposedly ‘founded’ by Zhu Qingyuan, a high-ranking gentry who fled the imperial court to avoid being embroiled in war. Revered as the apical ancestor of the Heyang Zhu Clan, the discussion of Zhu rejoins the twenty-first century, where these historic tales of ‘origins’ are told and sold as part of the ‘xiangchou Heyang’ tourism brand. The development of Heyang’s tourism industry is discussed to highlight its transformation from its fledgling grassroots iteration in the mid-1990s, to becoming a developmental priority for the county government in the 2010s.

Research on life stories has a short history but has emerged as a thriving field. While several key papers have spurred research (e.g., McAdams, 1985; Pasupathi, 2001) from a philosophy of science perspective, it is interesting how an individual paper helps a field to flourish. We traced the impact of one early theoretical paper, Habermas and Bluck (2000), using structural topic modeling. Grounded in classic lifespan theory (Baltes et al., 1998), this article bridged the gap between telling individual memories in childhood and narrating life stories in adulthood. The authors made the first formal argument for the emergence of the life story in adolescence. Since publication, the article has provided a reference for the study of life stories (> 2,000 citations; APA PsycNet, 2022) for authors in over forty countries. Structural topic modeling uses an unsupervised learning algorithm sensitive to temporal context. It was applied to the abstracts text of all articles ever citing Habermas and Bluck (2000). Modeling identified nine topic areas, showing their citation fluctuation. We report these historic trends, providing a lens for examining the evolution of the field of life stories over time.

The chapter examines how North African fiction in French has engaged with gaps in official history by foregrounding the stories of and about erased or forgotten events and actors, thus seeking to fill the factual and experiential lacunae of archival records. It first provides an overview of different generations of writers from the anti-colonial group who leveraged the symbolic powers of fiction to pave the way for independence to post-independence authors such as those who in the 1980s self-identified as “Beur” (first-generation French citizens born of parents who immigrated from North Africa) and the following generation of “banlieue” writers who emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The chapter then focuses on Assia Djebar’s 1985 novel L’Amour, la fantasia as a work that both exemplifies and exceeds the ethical stance and the aesthetic potential of the archival novel insofar as it mobilizes all the genre’s strategies of research, recovery, and representation while also questioning the very project of restoring the archive and thus revoking its presumed authority. The chapter admits to its own incompleteness, unknowing and linguistic partiality as it does not purport to account for the rich literary production in other languages such as Arabic, Tamazight, and English.

This chapter invites consideration of Bloomsbury as the Biography group. It details Bloomsbury’s founding and defining contributions to the “New Biography,” particularly in theoretical and creative works by Harold Nicolson, Virginia Woolf, and the most influential British biographer of the past century, Lytton Strachey. Focusing its attention most carefully on the latter two, it explores how both Woolf and Strachey, as “spiritual” writers of the modernist age (Woolf, “Modern Fiction”), understood biography as a means of revealing personality, while diverging on some essential matters. Woolf, whose initial understanding of biography as an art evolved into a more subdued description of it as (mere) craft, anticipated that this aim might be accomplished through archival assiduity over time by a succession of fact-bound biographers, each bringing a different perspective to facts, old and new. Strachey, for his part, who always considered biography an art form, thought such an aim might be accomplished in the present, using fictional means to reveal both the personality of the nominal biographical subject and the personality of the biographer. This chapter finally reads Strachey as the most important progenitor of biographical fiction.

The final chapter discusses the opera’s initial reception by nineteenth-century audiences and its future legacy. As many scholars have shown, regardless of its popularity today, the ‘mad scene’ in Act III was not popular in the years following the premiere in 1835. In fact, it was the character Edgardo and his music that received the most praise from audiences and critics alike. Chapter 7 sets out to answer why this was the case by presenting key critical reviews of the work, including those in Naples and Paris. Paris is a rather telling example, for Lucia appeared in three different versions: the original Italian work at the Théâtre-Italien (1837), a French-language version at the Théâtre de la Renaissance (1839) and a French grand opéra version with ballet at the Paris Opéra (1846). In addition to its reception in the press, Chapter 7 also discusses Lucia’s popularity with publishers of opera selections for the salon and the opera’s auspicious appearance in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857). Such reception points to the extent of the opera’s success outside the opera hall and serves as further evidence of Lucia in the everyday consciousness of European audiences.

This chapter explores Bloomsbury’s engagements with the United States of America between 1900 and 1960. It analyzes the personal and published writings of various members of the group about American art, politics, and culture. While there is no cohesive “Bloomsbury” position on the USA, it at once fascinated and appalled them, from their university days until late in their lives. From Roger Fry’s tenure at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, until his falling out with J. P. Morgan, through the widespread outrage in Britain at the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, and on to J. M. Keynes’ role at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 and Clive Bell’s 1950s lecture tours, the USA is a constant presence in their lives. Some welcomed the income that writing for American periodicals provided, while privately disdaining their readers. Others engaged with American politicians on the world stage in the wake of two World Wars. None of those who are associated with “Bloomsbury” held static views about the USA. This chapter explores how they refined and revised their opinions about it throughout the course of their lives.

What sort of thing are the narratives of the life of Jesus, literarily speaking? (History? Biography? Fiction? Myth?) And what bearing does their genre have on the manner of interpretation proper to them? This chapter attends to Origen’s account of the Gospels’ genre, literary precedents, and relationship to other forms of ancient literature in order to establish why he believes the Gospels cannot be read as transparently historical narratives. Here, I propose that the kind of narratives Origen believes the Evangelists compose is directly comparable to the stories one finds throughout the scriptures of Israel. Furthermore, Origen also relates the Gospels’ literary similarity to Jewish biblical narrative to the way they both share a similarly complex relationship to facticity. The Gospels, in sum, all narrate the deeds, sufferings, and words of Jesus “under the form of history”; these historical narratives are of a mixed character, interweaving things that happened with things that didn’t and even couldn’t, with an eye toward presenting the events recorded to have happened to Jesus figuratively.

This chapter is a description and analysis of the modern and postmodern periods and how they influenced theologians from a variety of traditions as they wrestled anew with the doctrine of Christ. In characterizing modernity as an era which celebrates universal reason and human progress, the author examines the ways in which modern theologians both chafed against and conformed to these insights as they developed their ideas about the person and work of Christ. Likewise, the author engages postmodernity as a disavowal of universal reason and progress, and thereby examines the manner in which these concepts were both rejected and embraced by various theologians as they sought to answer Christ’s question: “Who do you say I am?” within a postmodern era.