Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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While the autobiographical impulse of southern women writers had already been present in many of the slave narratives, letters and diaries they wrote in the antebellum and the bellum period, with Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Mary Boykin Chestnut’s A Diary from Dixie (1905) as classic examples, their works started to receive scholarly attention only in the 1990s.ssss1 Lucinda MacKethan starts Daughters of Time: Creating Woman’s Voice in Southern Story (1990) by discussing in Chapter One the letters of Catherine Hammond, a plantation wife, and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents. In Chapter Two, she reviews the autobiographies of Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston and Eudora Welty as “prodigal daughters” who “journeyed away from home and then returned” and whose autobiographies “were conceived and enacted as a means to explore, as well as to complete, the writer’s definition of herself as a writer” (39). Though the following list doesn’t claim to be exhaustive, new approaches to slave narratives and bellum diaries and memoirs published in the 1990s are worth mentioning. Frances Smith Foster’s Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892 (1993) is an example, which expanded on her previous work entitled Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives (1979). Likewise, Jennifer Fleischner’s Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family and Identity in Women’s Slave Narratives (1996) provides one more perspective on the same topic. Worth mentioning also is Michael O’Brien’s An Evening When Alone: Four Journals of Single Women in the South, 1827-67 (1993), as well as Walter Sullivan’s The War the Women Lived: Female Voices from the Confederate South (1995), which offers a selection of twenty-three Confederate women’s diaries and memoirs, including Mary Chestnut, Cornelia Peake McDonald, Sarah Morgan and Belle Boyd, among others.