Richard Lance Keeble







Lara Pawson's genre-bending memoir - gravitas and the celebration of unique cultural spaces

This paper argues that it is important to consider any text in its broader cultural context: to go beyond the conventional bibliographies to incorporate such media forms as reviews and interviews with the author. Together these works are worth both analysing - and (where appropriate) celebrating for their creation of what can be defined as unique 'cultural spaces'. Central, then, to an understanding and appreciation of Lara Pawson's memoir, This is the place to be (2016), are not only the bibliographies on memoir writing (particularly by women and journalists) and the texts which inspired it - but also some of the reviews and interviews it inspired. The genre-bending aspects of the text will be identified and analysed. The paper will also contrast what it terms the gravitas and légèreté of cultural spaces, suggesting that the cultural space occupied by Pawson's memoir is endowed with the former

Keywords: Lara Pawson, memoir, unique cultural spaces


References

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Note on the contributor

Richard Lance Keeble is Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln and Visiting Professor at Liverpool Hope University. Chair of the Orwell Society, he has written and edited 39 books on a range of media-related subjects.