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

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The History of Southern Women’s Literature (2002), edited by Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks, with its eighty-six essays by different prestigious scholars, traces the evolution and development of southern women writers, both black and white. It includes a fair number of essays on diaries, slave narratives and letters written in the antebellum and bellum period, as well as specific essays focusing on Harriet Jacobs and Mary Chestnut. Apart from several separate essays on some of the most prominent women writers who penned autobiographies, there are two relevant essays that focus exclusively on self-representation in the Renaissance period and in the contemporary South, respectively. Fred Hobson’s essay on “Southern Women’s Autobiography” points out how odd it is that neither Evelyn Scott’s Background in Tennessee (1937) nor Ellen Glasgow’s The Woman Within (1954) addressed race “with any honesty” (270). But he focuses mostly on racial conversion narratives and on white writers who wrote their autobiographies from the 1940s onwards—Lillian Smith, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Anne Braden, Sarah Patton Boyle—and on African American women writers like Pauli Murray, Maya Angelou, and Anne Moody. He also briefly lists other remarkable autobiographies and memoirs written by women from the 1970s on that centered around race, gender, sexuality, class and other issues. James H. Watkins in “Contemporary Autobiography and Memoir” focuses on ethnic and class diversity, the impact of feminism on memoirs and the constant flow of personal narratives written in the 1980s and particularly the 1990s, “with women as the dominant voice in southern life writing” (454). This outpouring of self-writing also coincided with “a virtual explosion in theoretical and critical approaches to selfrepresentation—with consequent implications for the ways in which life writing by southern women was produced and received” (448).