Women and Autobiography

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Martine Watson Brownley, Allison B. Kimmich
Rowman & Littlefield, 1999 - 215 pages
Autobiography, as evidenced by best-seller lists, is one of the most popular literary genres. However, because critics have long dismissed it as subpar literature, little attention has been paid to autobiography, particularly accounts by women.

Women and Autobiography, edited by Martine Watson Brownley and Allison B. Kimmich, offers an insightful perspective on this often overlooked field. This text gives a compact, comprehensive overview of women's autobiography, providing historical back-ground and contemporary criticism along with selections from a range of autobiographies by women. Developed primarily for undergraduates, Women and Autobiography combines theory and practice by pairing autobiographical selections and criticism.

This book is a useful tool for courses in autobiography, literature by women, and women's studies.

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Contents

Womens Lifewriting and the Male Autobiographical Tradition
1
The Female Self Engendered Autobiographical Writing and Theories of Selfhood
3
Womans Autobiographical Writings New Forms
15
Construing Truth in Lying Mouths Truthtelling in Womens Autobiography
33
Feminine Authorship and Spiritual Authority in Victorian Women Writers Autobiographies
53
GenderRelated Difference in the Slave Narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass
69
Theorizing the Female Subject Who Writes How and Why?
93
Reading for the Doubled Discourse of American Womens Autobiography
95
Rethinking Genre Autobiography in Other Forms
147
Expanding the Boundaries of Criticism The Diary as Female Autobiography
149
Autopathography Women Illness and Lifewriting
161
Womens Autobiography from the Early Modern Period to the Present Sample Texts
173
Seventeenth Century From A True Relation of My Birth Breeding and Life
175
Eighteenth Century From A Narrative of the Life of Mrs Charlotte Charke
183
Nineteenth Century From Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
193
Twentieth Century From All of a Piece A Life with Multiple Sclerosis
199

Woman as Other Other as Author Author as Man? The Authobiographical Dimension of The Second Sex
111
Beneath the Mask Autobiographies of JapaneseAmerican Women
129
Suggested Readings
209
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