Research Catalog

Title

Women and autobiography in the twentieth century : remembered futures / Linda Anderson.

Author

Anderson, Linda R., 1950-

Publication

London ; New York : Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1997.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

x, 174 p.; 22 cm.

Summary

Drawing on contemporary feminist, psychoanalytic and post-structuralist theory, this original and revealing work explores the autobiographical writings of six modern female authors: Alice James, Virginia Woolf, Vera Brittain, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. The book focuses on the variety of forms twentieth-century autobiographical writing by women has taken and looks closely at the different theoretical issues and critical interpretations they have generated. The author argues that the problem posed by a feminist criticism of autobiography is how to avoid speaking for or about the very discourses through which women themselves are attempting to speak. How can theory resist appropriating the female subject at the very point of her emergence? How can criticism recognise a potential gap between what is written and what has yet to be understood? Through careful analysis of specific texts, Linda Anderson enters into debate with critical work on autobiography and, at the same time, allows those texts to open up new questions about how we read and know them.

Subject

• James, Alice, 1848-1892 > Biography
• Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941 > Biography
• Brittain, Vera, 1893-1970 > Biography
• Plath, Sylvia > Biography
• Lorde, Audre > Biography
• Rich, Adrienne, 1929-2012 > Biography
• 1900-1999
• Geschichte 1900-1990
• Autobiography > Women authors
• English prose literature > History and criticism
• American prose literature > History and criticism
• Women authors, English > 20th century > History and criticism
• Women authors, American > 20th century > History and criticism
• Women > Great Britain > History and criticism
• Women > United States > History and criticism
• Feminism > Historiography

Genre/Form

• Biographies
• Criticism, interpretation, etc.
• Biographies.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 162-170) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Alice James: 'The subject is all that counts' -- Virginia Woolf: 'In the shadow of the Letter "I"'-- Vera Brittain: 'Not I but my generation' -- Sylvia Plath: '"I" and "you" and "Sylvia"' -- Feminist autobiography: the personal and the political.

ISBN

0133550346

LCCN

^^^96017070^//r97

OCLC

• 34557388
• SCSB-11102360

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library