Composing Selves (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

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 PrenshawAÆs 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 ôlate southern Victorian period,ö which began in 1861 and ended in the 1930s. Belle KearneyAÆs A SlaveholderAÆs Daughter (1900), with Elizabeth SpencerAÆs Landscapes of the Heart and Ellen DouglasAÆs Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell (both published in 1998) chronologically bookend PrenshawAÆs survey. She includes Ellen GlasgowAÆs The Woman Within, Marjorie Kinnan RawlingsAÆs Cross Creek, Bernice Kelly HarrisAÆs Southern Savory, and Zora Neale HurstonAÆs Dust Tracks on a Road. The book also examines Katherine DuPre LumpkinAÆs The Making of a Southerner and Lillian SmithAÆs Killers of the Dream. In addition to exploring multiple themes, Prenshaw considers a number of types of autobiographies, such as Helen KellerAÆs classic The Story of My Life and Anne Walter FearnAÆs My Days of Strength. She treats narratives of marital identity, as in Mary HamiltonAÆs Trials of the Earth, and draws attention to works by women who devoted their lives to social and political movements, like Virginia DurrAÆs Outside the Magic Circle. Drawing on many notable authors and on PrenshawAÆs own life of scholarship, Composing Selves provides an invaluable contribution to the study of southern literature autobiography, and the work of southern women writers.