Telling women's lives : the new biography / Linda Wagner-Martin. [electronic resource]

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wagner-Martin, Linda.

Wagner-Martin, Linda, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Biography as a literary form.

Women--Biography--Methodology.

Women.

Biography as a literary form--Methodology--Biography.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 201 p. ) ill. ;

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, c1994.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Placing herself in the avid reader's chair, Linda Wagner-Martin writes about women's biography from George Eliot and Virginia Woolf to Eleanor Roosevelt and Margaret Mead, and even to Cher and Elizabeth Taylor. Along the way, she looks at dozens of other life stories, probing at the differences between biographies of men and women, prevailing stereotypes about women's lives and roles, questions about what is public and private, and the hazy margins between autobiography, biography, and other genres. In quick-paced and wide-ranging discussions, she looks at issues of authorial stance (who controls the narrative? who chooses which story to tell?), voice (is this story told in the traditional objective tone? and if it is, what effect does that telling have on our reading?), and the politics of publishing (why aren't more books about women's lives published? and when they are, what happens to their advertising budgets?).

Contents:

Biography: the old and the new

Telling women's lives

The trap of the stereotype

Relinquishing stereotypes

The biographer's problem: women as wives

A woman's self: wives and writers

The power of naming

Listening to women's stories

Writing about mothers

Taking control of story: women's voices

Families of women

The best of them

Popular biography

Revisionist biographies of women.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. 183-192) and index.

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

ISBN:

0-8135-5897-2

0-585-02027-2