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Do Peasants Write Ego-Documents?: The ‘ordinary exception’ of Luigi Daldosso in the First World War
Open accessAbstract
Do peasants write ego-documents? We do find diaries and autobiographies written by peasants in modern Europe. But an autobiography is not necessarily an ego-document, if it reveals little about the ego and is very short on introspection. Peasant writings were characterized by their terse style, and their pragmatic concerns with the state of the harvest and the price of essential goods. They did not usually focus on the self. My article argues that the label ‘ego-document’ has been too freely applied to writings ‘from below’. I briefly discuss some issues in the study of life writing, and present a remarkable exception to the rule of peasant writings: the case of the autodidact Luigi Daldosso. Daldosso was an ‘ordinary exception’: he was an ordinary writer of humble social origins who practised literary and compositional skills rarely found amongst peasant authors.
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In the citing paper
“Luigi Daldosso, a peasant autodidact from the Trentino and a soldier in the multi-lingual army of the Austrian Empire, despised Hungarian, Czech and Croatian fellow-soldiers for what he perceived as their cowardice, not to mention his virulent contempt for southern Italians.”
From Understanding the Writing Revolution of the Late Nineteenth Century (2025) · cites this paper as Lyons, 2017
In the citing paper
“His autobiographical writing tells a story in which inter-ethnic conflict was always liable to erupt (Lyons, 2017, pp. 55-60).”
From Understanding the Writing Revolution of the Late Nineteenth Century (2025) · cites this paper as Lyons, 2017
Citations
Cites
Markussen, I. (1990) · Scandinavian Journal of History · doi:10.1080/03468759008579189 · Cited by 89
Cited by
Understanding the Writing Revolution of the Late Nineteenth Century
Lyons, M. (2025) · Culture & History Digital Journal · doi:10.3989/chdj.2025.404
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Metadata
- Authors
- Lyons, M.
- Affiliations
- UNSW Sydney (AU)
- Corresponding author
- Lyons, Martyn
- ORCID
- Lyons, Martyn
- Venue
- Quaerendo
- Publisher
- Walter de Gruyter GmbH
- Published
- 2017-04-20
- Volume
- 47
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 38-60
- ISSN
- 0014-9527 (ISSN-L)
- 1570-0690
- OpenAlex
- W2608259223
- Cited by
- 3
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2025: 2 · 2023: 1
- FWCI
- 0.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- handle.unsw.edu.au
- Licence
- cc-by-nc-nd
- Locations
- Quaerendo (publishedVersion)
- UNSWorks (UNSW Sydney) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- UNSWorks (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Autobiographical and Biographical Writing
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › Biographical and Historical Analysis
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › Medieval Literature and History
- Keywords
- ego-documents, life writing, diaries, peasants, autodidacts, self-representation, self-reflection, modern Europe
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- The paper
- Lyons, M. (2017). Do Peasants Write Ego-Documents?: The ‘ordinary exception’ of Luigi Daldosso in the First World War. Quaerendo. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700690-12341370
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
