Women, Autobiography, Theory

Women, Autobiography, Theory PDF Author: Sidonie Smith
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299158446
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
The first comprehensive guide to the burgeoning field of women's autobiography. Essays from 39 prominent critics and writers explore narratives across the centuries and from around the globe. A list of more than 200 women's autobiographies and a comprehensive bibliography provide invaluable information for scholars, teachers, and readers.

Women, Autobiography, Theory

Women, Autobiography, Theory PDF Author: Sidonie Smith
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299158446
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
The first comprehensive guide to the burgeoning field of women's autobiography. Essays from 39 prominent critics and writers explore narratives across the centuries and from around the globe. A list of more than 200 women's autobiographies and a comprehensive bibliography provide invaluable information for scholars, teachers, and readers.

Women and Autobiography

Women and Autobiography PDF Author: Martine Watson Brownley
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780842027021
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
An overview of women's autobiography, providing historical background and contemporary criticism along with selections from a range of autobiographies by women. It seeks to provide a broad introduction to the major questions dominating autobiographical scholarship today.

A Poetics of Women's Autobiography

A Poetics of Women's Autobiography PDF Author: Sidonie Smith
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780253204431
Category : Autobiografía - Mujeres como autoras
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description


Interfaces

Interfaces PDF Author: Sidonie Smith
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472068142
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
Charts the ways that woman artists have represented themselves and their life stories

Life/Lines

Life/Lines PDF Author: Bella Brodzki
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501745565
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
Autobiography raises a vital issue in feminist critical theory today: the imperative need to situate the female subject. Life/Lines, a collection of essays on women's autobiography, attempts to meet this need.

Black Women Writing Autobiography

Black Women Writing Autobiography PDF Author: Joanne M. Braxton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780877226390
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
"As black American women, we are born into a mystic sisterhood, and we live our lives within a magic circle, a realm of shared language, reference, and allusion within the veil of our blackness and our femaleness. We have been as invisible to the dominant culture as rain; we have been knowers, but we have not been known." Joanne Braxton argues for a redefinition of the genre of black American autobiography to include the images of women as well as their memoirs, reminiscences, diaries, and journals—as a corrective to both black and feminist literary criticism. Beginning with slave narratives and concluding with modern autobiography, she deals with individual works as representing stages in a continuum and situates these works in the context of other writings by both black and white writers. Braxton demonstrates that the criteria used to define the slave narrative genre are inadequate for analyzing Harriet "Linda Brent" Jacobs's pseudonymously publishedIncidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself(1861). She examines "sass" as a mode of women's discourse and a weapon of self-defense, and she introduces the "outraged mother" as a parallel to the articulate hero archetype. Not even emancipation authorized black women to define themselves or address an audience. Late-nineteenth-century accounts in the form of confessional spiritual autobiographies, travelogue/adventure stories, and slave memoirs enabled such women as Jarena Lee, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Elizabeth Keckley, Susie King Taylor, as well as Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth to tell their own extraordinary stories and to shed light on the thousands of lives obscured by illiteracy and sexual and racial oppression. In her diaries, Charlotte Forten Grimké, the gifted poet, epitomizes the problems faced by a well-educated, extremely articulate black woman attempting to find a public voice in America. Moving into the twentieth century, Braxton analyzes the memoir of Ida B. Wells, journalist and anti-lynching activist, and the work of Zora Neale Hurston and Era Bell Thompson. They represent the first generation of black female autobiographers who did not continually come into contact with former slaves and who transcended the essential struggle for survival that occupied earlier writings. For the contemporary black woman autobiographer, the quest for personal fulfillment is the central theme. Braxton concludes with Maya Angelou'sI Know Why the Caged Bird Sings(1996), which represents the black woman of the 1960s who has found the place to recreate the self in her own image—the place all the others had been searching for. Author note:Joanne M. Braxtonis Cummings Professor of American Studies and English at the College of William and Mary and author ofSometimes I think of Maryland, a collection of poems.

Sisters of the Spirit

Sisters of the Spirit PDF Author: William L. Andrews
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253115248
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
"Sisters of the Spirit . . . should interest a wider audience. . . . These fascinating accounts can stand on their own. . . . Mr. Andrews has made them even more accessible by providing a comprehensive introduction and helpful footnotes . . . but he does not intrude on the text itself." —New York Times Book Review " . . . informative and inspiring reading." —The Journal of American History Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, and Julia Foote underwent a revolution in their own sense of self that helped to launch a feminist revolution in American religious life and in American society as a whole.

Composing Selves

Composing Selves PDF Author: Peggy Whitman Prenshaw
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807139769
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 588

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Book Description
In Composing Selves, award-winning author Peggy Whitman Prenshaw provides the most comprehensive treatment of autobiographies by women in the American South. This long-anticipated addition to Prenshaw's study of southern literature spans the twentieth century as she provides an in-depth look at the life-writing of eighteen women authors. Composing Selves travels the wide terrain of female life in the South, analyzing various issues that range from racial consciousness to the deflection of personal achievement. All of the authors presented came of age during the era Prenshaw refers to as the "late southern Victorian period," which began in 1861 and ended in the 1930s. Belle Kearney's A Slaveholder's Daughter (1900) with Elizabeth Spencer's Landscapes of the Heart and Ellen Douglas's Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell (both published in 1998) chronologically bookend Prenshaw's survey. She includes Ellen Glasgow's The Woman Within, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's Cross Creek, Bernice Kelly Harris's Southern Savory, and Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road. The book also examines Katharine DuPre Lumpkin's The Making of a Southerner and Lillian Smith's Killers of the Dream. In addition to exploring multiple themes, Prenshaw considers a number of types of autobiographies, such as Helen Keller's classic The Story of My Life and Anne Walter Fearn's My Days of Strength. She treats narratives of marital identity, as in Mary Hamilton's Trials of the Earth, and calls attention to works by women who devoted their lives to social and political movements, like Virginia Durr's Outside the Magic Circle. Drawing on many notable authors and on Prenshaw's own life of scholarship, Composing Selves provides an invaluable contribution to the study of southern literature, autobiography, and the work of southern women writers.

Before They Could Vote

Before They Could Vote PDF Author: Sidonie A. Smith
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299220532
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
The life narratives in this collection are by ethnically diverse women of energy and ambition—some well known, some forgotten over generations—who confronted barriers of gender, class, race, and sexual difference as they pursued or adapted to adventurous new lives in a rapidly changing America. The engaging selections—from captivity narratives to letters, manifestos, criminal confessions, and childhood sketches—span a hundred years in which women increasingly asserted themselves publicly. Some rose to positions of prominence as writers, activists, and artists; some sought education or wrote to support themselves and their families; some transgressed social norms in search of new possibilities. Each woman's story is strikingly individual, yet the brief narratives in this anthology collectively chart bold new visions of women's agency. "This rich new anthology sets in motion an inter-textual conversation of remarkable vitality that will change the ways we understand gender, class, ethnicity, culture, and nation in nineteenth-century America."—Susanna Egan, author of Mirror-Talk

Radical Spiritual Motherhood

Radical Spiritual Motherhood PDF Author: Rosetta R. Haynes
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807146935
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
In this cutting-edge work, Rosetta R. Haynes explores the spiritual autobiographies of five nineteenth-century female African American itinerant preachers to discover the ways in which they drew upon religion and the material conditions of their lives to fashion powerful personas that enabled them to pursue their missions as divinely appointed religious leaders. Haynes examines the lives and narratives of Jarena Lee (1783--?), Zilpha Elaw (c. 1790--?), Julia Foote (1823--1900), Amanda Berry Smith (1837--1915), and Rebecca Cox Jackson (1795--1871) through an innovative conceptual framework Haynes terms "radical spiritual motherhood" -- an empowering identity deriving from the experience of "sanctification," a kind of spiritual perfection following conversion. Drawing upon conventional nineteenth-century standards for motherhood, radical spiritual motherhood also challenges traditional standards: These were women whose religious missions authorized them to preach in public, to assume an activist role, and to declare sexual autonomy through celibacy. They redefined their relationships to the powers that be by becoming instruments of God in a kind of protofeminist gesture. Haynes uses historical methods, feminist literary theory, and liberation theology to investigate the ways these women, as reflected especially in their autobiographies, employed the idea of motherhood to fashion strong, authentic identities as women called to preach the gospel. Though radical spiritual motherhood is an identity specifically adopted by free black women, the lives and texts of these itinerant preachers retain close ties to those of enslaved black women through the negative cultural stereotypes assigned to both groups. To illustrate this connection, Haynes analyzes the writings of the preachers within the context of the narratives of former slaves Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince, and Sojourner Truth. Haynes also links the lineage of radical spiritual motherhood to a modern woman by considering Pauli Murray (1910--1985), the first African American woman (and the second African American) to be ordained as an Episcopal priest. By looking at Murray's intellectual and spiritual development, especially her feminist ideologies, social activism, and espousal of liberation theology, Haynes shows that Murray was in fact a modern-day radical spiritual mother. Pioneering and accessible, Radical Spiritual Motherhood marks a turning point in the study of both African American literature and women's studies.