The Private self : theory and practice of women's autobiographical writings / edited by Shari Benstock.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Benstock, Shari, 1944-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English prose literature--Women authors--History and criticism.

English prose literature.

English prose literature--Women authors.

Autobiography.

American prose literature--Women authors--History and criticism.

American prose literature.

American prose literature--Women authors.

Women--Great Britain--Biography--History and criticism.

Women.

Great Britain.

Women--United States--Biography--History and criticism.

United States.

Women authors, English--Biography--History and criticism.

Women authors, English.

Women authors, English--Biography.

Women authors, American--Biography--History and criticism.

Women authors, American.

Women authors, American--Biography.

Women and literature.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

vi, 319 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [1988]

Summary:

This collection of twelve essays discusses the principles and practices of women's autobiographical writing in the United States, England, and France from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Employing feminist and post-structuralist methodologies, the essays examine a wide range of private life writings -- letters, journals, diaries, memoirs, pedagogical texts, and fictional and factual autobiographies.

The Private Self explores the links between the historical devaluation of women's writings and the cultural definitions of women that have constrained their writing practices and excluded them from the canon of traditional autobiographical texts. Collectively, these essays expose the cultural biases that have informed most of the work on autobiography to date -- biases that derive from notions of selfhood defined by a white, masculine, and Christian experience. In an effort to revise our prevailing concept of autobiography, these essays deal with differences of race, class, religion, sexual orientation, and gender.

Discussed here are writings by more than two dozen women including Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Alice James, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Forten Grimke, Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Sophie Kovalevsky, Anais Nin, Hilda Doolittle, and Simone de Beauvoir. The work of these writers reveals a split between public and private self-representations, and it is the notion of a private self expressed through women's autobiographical writings that forms the link among all the essays.

Contents:

Part I Theories of Autobiography 7

1. Authorizing the Autobiographical / Shari Benstock 10

2. Women's Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice / Susan Stanford Friedman 34

3. My Statue, My Self: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women / Elizabeth Fox-Genovese 63

4. Simone de Beauvoir: Aging and Its Discontents / Kathleen Woodward 90

5. Invincible Mediocrity: The Private Selves of Public Women / Jane Marcus 114

6. Eighteenth-Century Women's Autobiographical Commonplaces / Felicity A. Nussbaum 147

Part II Autobiographical Practices 173

7. Female Rhetorics / Patricia Meyer Spacks 177

8. Pedagogy as Self-Expression in Mary Wollstonecraft: Exorcising the Past, Finding a Voice / Mitzi Myers 192

9. Representing Two Cultures: Jane Austen's Letters / Deborah Kaplan 211

10. Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals: Putting Herself Down / James Holt McGavran, Jr. 230

11. Charlotte Forten Grimke and the Search for a Public Voice / Joanne M. Braxton 254

12. "Wider Than the Sky": Public Presence and Private Self in Dickinson, James, and Woolf / Nancy Walker 272.

Notes:

Includes bibliographies and index.

ISBN:

0807817910

0807842184

OCLC:

17479191