Women's Lives/Women's Times

New Essays on Auto/Biography

Edited by Trev Lynn Broughton & Linda Anderson

Subjects: Education
Series: SUNY series, Feminist Theory in Education
Paperback : 9780791433980, 291 pages, May 1997
Hardcover : 9780791433973, 291 pages, May 1997

Alternative formats available from:

Read Excerpt View Table of Contents

Request Desk or Examination Copy
Request a Media Review Copy

Table of contents

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PREFACE

PART I HISTORIANS OF THE SELF

Introduction

1. "Life Has Done Almost as Well as Art": Deconstructing The Maimie Papers

Margaretta Jolly

2. "A Short Account of My Unprofitable Life": Autobiographies of Working Class Women in Britain c. 1775-1845

Jane Rendall

3. "Pondering All These Things in Her Heart": Aspects of Secrecy in the Autobiographical Writings of Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen

Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox

4. Striking Rock: The Letters of Ray Strachey to Her Family, 1929-1935

Johanna Alberti

PART II SELVES AND OTHERS

Introduction

5. In Search of a Voice for Dopdi/Draupadi: Writing the Other Woman's Story Out of the "Dark Continent"

Ranjana Khanna

6. Leslie Stephen, Anny Thackeray Ritchie, and the Sexual Politics of Genre: Missing Her

Trev Lynn Broughton

7. What Is [Not] Remembered: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Gabriele Griffin

8. The Memoirs of Halidé Edib: A Turkish Woman Writer in Exile

Ayse Durakbasa

PART III SUBJECTIVES

Introduction

9. Autobiography and Orality: The Work of Modernist Women Writers

Sabine Vanacker

10. Silent Witness: Memory and Omission in Natalia Ginzburg's Family Sayings

Judith Woolf

PART IV LIVES IN PRACTICE

Introduction

11. Their Wars

Nicole Ward Jouve

12. "Invisible Presences": Life-Writing and Vera Brittain's Testament of Friendship

Marion Shaw

13. "Tidal Edges" in Contemporary Women's Poetry: Towards a Model of Critical Empathy

Vicki Bertram

CONTRIBUTORS

INDEX

Points to the many ways in which the study of autobiography can contribute to the theory, practice, and politics of women’s studies as curriculum, and to feminist theory more generally.

Description

Women's Lives/Women's Times reflects the growing interest in life-writing as a basis for both feminist theorizing and women-centered education. It discusses the many ways in which the study of autobiography can contribute to the theory, practice, and politics of women's studies as curriculum, and to feminist theory more generally.

This volume is concerned with the application of theory to text—particularly with the assumptions and discourses of postmodernism—but also in exploring how general theories of the subject do not always fit comfortably with the specifics of autobiographical writing. It also recognizes the challenge women's autobiography offers to theory, taking us, in its complex weave of the personal, the political, and the theoretical, beyond the usual generic and disciplinary boundaries.

Trev Lynn Broughton is Lecturer in Women's Studies at the Centre for Women's Studies, University of York. Linda Anderson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University, Newcastle Upon Tyne.

Reviews

"What I like most about this book is the fine balance between theory and pedagogy it achieves. The theoretical discussions are carefully developed, thoughtful, and richly provocative, drawing on complex theories to unpack the subtleties and contradictions of women's autobiography in its many forms. Yet the essays themselves are full of valuable and very accessible information that could be used to develop and/or enrich courses in women's autobiography and women's studies in general.

"The book is very interesting to read. The essays raise some fascinating questions about what constitutes women's autobiography, the implications of woman representing themselves as 'subject,' and the role of language in the construction of subject. " — Sandra Jamieson, Drew University