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

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Autobiography in the form of travelogue, frequently presented as a voyage of self-discovery, has figured prominently in southern literature and entered our discussion of life-writing.ssss1 Southern autobiography has often merged with travel literature to show the journeys, whether psychological or physical, southern writers undertake when they respond to the autobiographical impulse. Lillian Hellman, one of the authors Robert H. Brinkmeyer covers in The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930-1950 (2009), famously recounted in An Unfinished Woman, the first of her four memoirs, her trips to Spain to support Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Mary Lee Settle, another supporter of leftist causes in Europe, wrote her last book Spanish Recognitions: The Roads to the Present (2004) at 87 in the form of a travelogue to narrate her second trip to Spain, carrying “the poems of St John of the Cross and St Teresa [of Ávila’s] dear autobiography” (10-11). In that second trip, she recognizes mountains that remind her of the ones she left in West Virginia, with their power to shape people and their past, but she also feels a sense of kinship that makes her say “they are our kin” (12). As Hellman and Settle seem to have sensed, at the root of autobiography are the notion of pilgrimage—as an inner and outer journey—and the idea of self-exploration, the same that can be found in Margery Kempe’s The Book of Margery Kempe (1436), the first autobiography written in English. Kempe’s 1417 pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James at Santiago de Compostela, Spain, forever associated the city with autobiography.