In recent decades, there has been a substantial turn towards narrative and life history study. The embrace of narrative and life history work has accompanied the move to postmodernism and post-structuralism across a wide range of disciplines: sociological studies, gender studies, cultural studies, social history; literary theory; and, most recently, psychology. Written by leading international scholars from the main contributing perspectives and disciplines, The Routledge International Handbook on Narrative and Life History seeks to capture the range and scope as well as the considerable complexity of the field of narrative study and life history work by situating these fields of study within the historical and contemporary context. Topics covered include: • The historical emergences of life history and narrative study • Techniques for conducting life history and narrative study • Identity and politics • Generational history • Social and psycho-social approaches to narrative history With chapters from expert contributors, this volume will prove a comprehensive and authoritative resource to students, researchers and educators interested in narrative theory, analysis and interpretation.

Enriched Classics offer readers accessible editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and commentary. Each book includes educational tools alongside the text, enabling students and readers alike to gain a deeper and more developed understanding of the writer and their work. Frederick Douglass’s powerful autobiographical account of life in bondage, his triumphant escape to freedom, and his analysis of slavery as a condition. Enriched Classics enhance your engagement by introducing and explaining the historical and cultural significance of the work, the author’s personal history, and what impact this book had on subsequent scholarship. Each book includes discussion questions that help clarify and reinforce major themes and reading recommendations for further research. Read with confidence.

"A deeply moving, funny, and brilliantly written account from one of India’s most original new voices." —Katherine Boo Like Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun and Alexander Masters’s Stuart, this is a tour de force of narrative reportage. Mohammed Ashraf studied biology, became a butcher, a tailor, and an electrician’s apprentice; now he is a homeless day laborer in the heart of old Delhi. How did he end up this way? In an astonishing debut, Aman Sethi brings him and his indelible group of friends to life through their adventures and misfortunes in the Old Delhi Railway Station, the harrowing wards of a tuberculosis hospital, an illegal bar made of cardboard and plywood, and into Beggars Court and back onto the streets. In a time of global economic strain, this is an unforgettable evocation of persistence in the face of poverty in one of the world’s largest cities. Sethi recounts Ashraf’s surprising life story with wit, candor, and verve, and A Free Man becomes a moving story of the many ways a man can be free.

Tibetan biographers began writing Jetsun Milarepa's (1052–1135) life story shortly after his death, initiating a literary tradition that turned the poet and saint into a model of virtuosic Buddhist practice throughout the Himalayan world. Andrew Quintman traces this history and its innovations in narrative and aesthetic representation across four centuries, culminating in a detailed analysis of the genre's most famous example, composed in 1488 by Tsangnyön Heruka, or the "Madman of Western Tibet." Quintman imagines these works as a kind of physical body supplanting the yogin's corporeal relics.

The Life of Margaret Alice Murray: A Woman’s Work in Archaeology is the first book-length biography of Margaret Alice Murray (1863–1963), one of the first women to practice archeology. Despite Murray’s numerous professional successes, her career has received little attention because she has been overshadowed by her mentor, Sir Flinders Petrie. This oversight has obscured the significance of her career including her fieldwork, the students she trained, her administration of the pioneering Egyptology Department at University College London (UCL), and her published works. Rather than focusing on Murray’s involvement in Petrie’s archaeological program, Kathleen L. Sheppard treats Murray as a practicing scientist with theories, ideas, and accomplishments of her own. This book analyzes the life and career of Margaret Alice Murray as a teacher, excavator, scholar, and popularizer of Egyptology, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, and more. Sheppard also analyzes areas outside of Murray’s archaeology career, including her involvement in the suffrage movement, her work in folklore and witchcraft studies, and her life after her official retirement from UCL.

Moving away from criminal behaviour can be fraught with difficulties. Often it can involve leaving behind old habits, customs, and even friends, while at the same time adopting a new way of life. How do individuals go about making a decision to give up crime? How do they plan to sustain this decision? And in what ways does probation help? This book explores these questions. Based on in-depth interviews with a group of men under probation supervision, Sam King investigates the factors associated with making a decision to desist from crime. The book examines strategies for desistance, and explores the factors that individuals consider when they are thinking about how they will desist. In doing so, the book sheds new light on existing understandings of desistance from crime and helps to develop our understandings of the role that individuals play in constructing their own desistance journeys. This book also highlights the role of probation in this process, offering a timely and critical review of the nature of probation under the New Labour government in the UK between 1997-2010. The findings indicate that we should allow Probation Officers greater autonomy and discretion within their roles, and that we should free them from the bureaucracy of risk assessment and targets. Moreover, the book warns against the potential fragmentation of community supervision. As such, the book will be of interest to criminology students, researchers, academics, policymakers and practitioners, particularly those who work with ex-offenders in the community.