Essays on Life Writing : : From Genre to Critical Practice / / ed. by Marlene Kadar.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Toronto Press eBook-Package Archive 1933-1999
• MitwirkendeR: Anderson, Ellen M.,; Buss, Helen M.,; Cohen, Elizabeth S.,; Cohen, Thomas V.,; Cole, Sally,; Cooke, Nathalie,; Hinz, Evelyn J.,; Kadar, Marlene,; Neuman, Shirley,; Ty, Eleanor,; Van Wart, Alice,; Verduyn, Christl,; Williamson, Janice,
• HerausgeberIn: Kadar, Marlene,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2016]; ©1992
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Series: Theory / Culture
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (234 p.)

Life writing is the most flexible and open term available for autobiographical fragments and other kinds of autobiographical-seeming texts. It includes the conventional genres of autobiography, journals, memoirs, letters, testimonies, and metafiction, and in earlier definitions it included biography. It is a way of seeing literary and other texts that neither objectifies nor subjectifies the nature of a particular cultural truth.Marlene Kadar has brought together an interdisciplinary and comparative collection of critical and theoretical essays by diverse Canadian scholars, most of whom are women engaged in larger projects in life writing or in archival research. In the more practical pieces the author has discerned a pattern in autobiographical text, or subtext, that has come to revolutionize the life, the critic’s approach, or the discipline itself. In the theoretical pieces, authors make cogent proposals to view a body of literature in a new way, often in order to incorporate feminist visions or humanistic interpretations.The contributors represent a broad range of scholars from disciplines within the humanities and beyond. Collectively they provide an impressive overview of a growing field of scholarship.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Coming to Terms: Life Writing - from Genre to Critical Practice -- PART ONE. Literary Women Who Write the Self -- Introduction to Part One -- 1. 'Life out of Art': Elizabeth Smart's Early Journals -- 2. Between the Lines: Marian Engel's Cahiers and Notebooks -- 3. Anna Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada as Epistolary Dijournal -- 4. Writing as a Daughter: Autobiography in Wollstonecraft's Travelogue -- PART TWO. Recording a Life and the Construction of Self -- Introduction to Part Two -- 5. Court Testimony from the Past: Self and Culture in the Making of Text -- 6. Agostino Bonamore and the Secret Pigeon -- 7. Anthropological Lives: The Reflexive Tradition in a Social Science -- PART THREE. Fiction and Autofiction as Life Writing -- Introduction to Part Three -- 8. 'I Peel Myself out of My Own Skin': Reading Don't; A Woman's Word -- 9. Whose Life Is It Anyway? Out of the Bathtub and into the Narrative -- 10. Reading Reflections: The Autobiographical Illusion in Cat's Eye -- 11. Dreaming a True Story: The Disenchantment of the Hero in Don Quixote, Part 2 -- PART FOUR. Poetics and Life Writing -- Introduction to Part Four -- 12. Mimesis: The Dramatic Lineage of Auto/Biography -- 13. Autobiography: From Different Poetics to a Poetics of Differences -- Biographical Notes