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摘要
摘要
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.
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The doyenne of southern women's writing, Prenshaw (emer., Louisiana State Univ.) here turns her attention to the personal narratives of 18 southern women, confirming her reputation as a pioneering, meticulous scholar. In the first chapter, she reviews relevant scholarship, including work on the history of southern women, analyses of what makes the South distinctive, theories of autobiography (general and feminist), and literary criticism. Her goal is "an exploration of autobiography, women narrators, and 'southernness,' and the ways in which regionality, gender, and genre are experienced, enacted and thus made visible in a variety of life writings by southern women." To that end, she considers writing by women who came of age in the "late southern Victorian period" (1865-1930s), including work by well-recognized names (Ellen Glasgow, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston, Lillian Smith, Virginia Durr) and also that of several less-known writers deserving of recognition. Tracing such themes as race, identity, regionalism, the "cult of true womanhood," the Lost Cause, and the credibility of memory, she looks at the indirection women use in writing personal narratives, the focus on relationships rather than self, and the role of the narrator as witness. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above. E. R. Baer Gustavus Adolphus College
目录
Acknowledgments | p. ix |
1 Region, Genre, Gender | p. 1 |
2 A Feminist Life Narrative in a Traditionalist Society | p. 39 |
3 A Distanced Southern Girlhood | p. 67 |
4 Wifehood Narratives | p. 95 |
5 Belles, Wives, and Public Lives, Part I | p. 126 |
6 Belles, Wives, and Public Lives, Part II | p. 150 |
7 Testimonial Narratives of Racial Consciousness | p. 179 |
8 Narratives of a Writing Life, Part I | p. 212 |
9 Narratives of a Writing Life, Part II | p. 234 |
10 Modes of Autobiographical Narrative | p. 254 |
Coda: Reflections on a Literary Genre | p. 292 |
Notes | p. 295 |
Works Cited | p. 301 |
Index | p. 315 |