Drawing Elias – sketches from four interviews

[From introduction] The four interviews that we take as the source material for this overview were all considered for inclusion in the forthcoming volume, Interviews and Autobiographical Reflections (Jephcott et al. Elias, 2013), volume 17 of the Elias Collected Works. The volume, due for publication in late 2013, contains some thirteen interviews, including previously unpublished biographical materials and transcripts that are for the first time available in English. The interviews we consider here were ultimately not included in Interviews and Autobiographical Reflections owing principally to their overlap with, and repetition of, some of the other biographical sources. Their having been so close to inclusion in the volume, and having been translated into English, it would have been something of a wasted opportunity to omit their publication altogether. Accordingly, partly by virtue of our interest in aspects of Elias’s biography and his sociology more generally (see, for example, Goodwin and Hughes 2011), we were presented with the chance to provide for this edition of Human Figurations a short introduction to the interviews, together with the interviews in their totality.