The Tradition Of Women S Autobiography From Antiquity To The Present

In this ground-breaking literary history, Estelle Jelinek traces startling consistencies in the way women have written about their lives from an early Roman memoir to contemporary American autobiographies. In fact, Jelinek establishes a distinctive tradition of women's autobiography that differs remarkably from men's autobiography in content, narrative form, and projected self-image.For all those interested in literature, history, and women's studies, The Tradition of Women's Autobiography challenges us to reevaluate the art of autobiography, enriching and expanding the genre's possibilities to include a women's tradition whose respected place in the literary history of the genre is long overdue.

Margaret Cavendish was the most extraordinary seventeenth-century Englishwoman, refusing to be silent when exiled by the Crowmellian regime, she fought to make her voice heard through her fascinating publications.

First Published in 1991. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is one of a series of bibliographical guides designed to meet the needs of undergraduates, postgraduates and their teachers in universities and colleges of further education. All volumes in the series share a number of common characteristics. They are selective, manageable in size, and include those books and articles which are considered most important and useful. All are editied by practising teachers of the subject in question and are based on their experience of the needs of students. The arrangement combines chronological with thematic divisions. Most of the items listed receive some descriptive comment.

Focus on the works of Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gertrude Stein, Mary McCarthy, Maxine Hong Kingston, and others.

This book highlights the centrality of the autobiographical enterprise to Italian women’s writing through the twentieth century—a century that has frequently been referred to as the century of the self. Ursula Fanning addresses the thorny issue of essentialism potentially involved in underlining links between women’s writing and autobiographical modes, and ultimately rejects it in favor of an argument based on the cultural, linguistic, and literary marginalization of women writers within the Italian context. It is concerned with Italian women writers’ various ways of grappling with constructions of subjectivity throughout the century and sets out to explore them. Fanning reads autobiographical writing as subject to many of the same constraints as fiction and, in doing so, draws attention to the significance of the recurring use of the terms “pure” and “impure” in many critical and theoretical discussions of the autobiographical (where “pure” is used to suggest a truthful representation of a life, while “impure” suggests the messy undertaking of mixing lived experience with fiction). Recurring patterns and paradigms are found in the works of the various writers considered (eighteen in all), and these paradigms are analyzed through close readings of their works. These close readings offer insights into approaches to the constructions of subjectivity in the narratives and are informed by feminist theories. The chapters focus on selves in relationship, taking their lead from the patterns unfolding in the writers’ work, hence the subjects are constructed as daughters (with different views of the self in relation to fathers and mothers), within the confines of the romantic relationship (which involves reconsiderations and rewritings of the romance plot), as maternal subjects, and as writers (with an eye on their relationship to the literary canon, as well as to the relationship with readers). This book argues that there is such a thing as gendered subjectivity and that its constructions may be traced through the texts analyzed.