Historiography and Life Writing

Abstract

This chapter opens by situating Lawrence’s engagement with historiography in relation to early twentieth-century debates about the status of history as an art or a science. It examines Lawrence’s school textbook Movements in European History, showing how he incorporated the contemporary graphic and scientific approaches in his narrative to articulate a distinctive epochal approach to history. It then explores Lawrence’s innovative engagement with life writing as an historiographical form, demonstrating Lawrence’s contribution to the issues raised by the modernist ‘New Biography’. It traces his reflections on, and experiments in, fictional autobiography, autobiography (taking account of his late essays and the poem ‘A Life History in Harmonies and Discords’), biography (the ‘Memoir of Maurice Magnus’) and auto/biografiction.