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

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Studies that included an increasing multiplicity of southern female voices appeared in the 1990s. Apart from Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s 1990 essay, included in Berry’s Located Lives, “Between Individualism and Community: Autobiographies of Southern Women” on the autobiographies of black and white southern women, William Brantley’s Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir (1993) is the first book-length study that discusses the autobiographical works of southern women writers. His volume deals with the autobiographies of Lillian Smith, Ellen Glasgow, Eudora Welty, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, and Zora Neale Hurston. The will to modify errors and omissions in some of the articles in Located Lives is what propels Brantley’s volume on southern women writers’ life narratives. Brantley’s aim with this book is not only “to deprovincialize the Southern Renaissance—to redefine it without abstract a priori conditions for what constitutes ‘southernness’” but also “to show how and why this body of writing can be seen as more than a mere foil for their ‘creative’ work” (xi). Brantley notes that “[t]here is a real need, however, to look carefully at the intellectual and autobiographical prose of southern women writers” and to pay attention to the other Souths—the black South and the female South—long excluded from the canon of southern literature traditionally seen as white and male (14). Proof of the diversity of the autobiographical impulse in the South is James H. Watkins’ anthology entitled Southern Selves: From Mark Twain and Eudora Welty to Maya Angelou and Kaye Gibbons, A Collection of Autobiographical Writings (1998), in which he brings together excerpts from thirty-one southern authors, including men and women, black and white, as well as a few Appalachian writers. Though narrower in scope than Brantley’s study, Darlene O’Dell’s volume Sites of Southern Memory: The Autobiographies of Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray (2001) offers also racial diversity in her selection of southern women and their autobiographies. O’Dell views the memoirs and autobiographies selected as “sites of personal memory, places where the authors unearth the meanings of their culture’s symbols and rituals” (3), and as “site[s] of regional memory, like the monuments and memorials to Lost Cause memory and like the southern body as a place where regional identity is contested” (6). The autobiographies of Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin and Lillian Smith, along with that of Belle Kearney, are also explored in Jeanne Perreault’s essay, “Southern White Women’s Autobiographies: Social Equality and Social Change” (2008). Perreault focuses on “how each of these writers uses the issue of ‘social inequality,’” which is based on race (32).