Public lives, intimate archives: Queer biographical practices in British women's writing, 1928--1978.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Micir, Melanie.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania. English.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Gender identity.

English literature.

Irish literature.

British literature.

Women's studies.

0453.

0593.

0733.

Local Subjects:

0453.

0593.

0733.

Physical Description:

163 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 73-09A(E).

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

This dissertation charts the phenomenon of a biographical turn in the late career work of Virginia Woolf, Vera Brittain, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Hope Mirrlees. I argue that these writers use biography in order to engage in what I call "generic activism" on behalf of marginalized sexual subjects. In Chapter One, "'How does it feel to be an anachronism?': Biography, Sexuality, and Temporality in Virginia Woolf's Orlando," I argue that by historicizing Orlando's formal play with the conventions of biography, we can read Woolf's first effort to abandon the modernist novel as a turn toward an expansion of normative models of the subject in the writing of history. In Chapter Two, I argue that Vera Brittain's Testament of Friendship: The Life of Winifred Holtby illuminates the shifting alliances and antagonisms between feminist and lesbian politics in post-1928 Britain. In the second half of the dissertation, which shifts in perspective from the published text to the privately constructed archive, I turn to two unpublished life stories. My third chapter, "'Living in two tenses, and very agreeably': On the Intimate Archives of Sylvia Townsend Warner," argues that, after publishing her sole biography, T. H. White, Warner spent many years preparing what I call an "intimate archive" that would safely guard the story of her relationship with Valentine Ackland against the censorious blasts of a contemporary readership. Finally, in "'The Cult of the Past': On the Lives of Hope Mirrlees," I suggest that Mirrlees' two late biographical projects—an unfinished biography of Jane Ellen Harrison and a bloated biography of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton—are spectacular failures that demonstrate a complex engagement with the overlapping temporalities of shared lives, histories, and audiences. Whether published in encoded desire or squirreled away in intimate archives, the late biographical practices of Woolf, Brittain, Mirrlees, and Warner are modes of life writing that summon a transhistorical audience. Following Edward Said's theorizations of "late style" as "in, but oddly apart from the present," I suggest that these intimate biographical acts should be read as one of the late genres of a queer modernism.

Notes:

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-09(E), Section: A.

Adviser: James F. English.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 2012.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

ISBN:

9781267355225

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.