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

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This volume contains a selection of essays by American and European historians and literature scholars who discuss southern life-writing. The following essays offer a self-portrait of the South and southerners as told in their rich body of autobiographical writing, reflecting a variety of readings and perspectives. These new readings on how southerners construct the self cover a wide spectrum, ranging from some of the earliest autobiographical writings in southern literature to contemporary and internationally renowned southern authors. Through discussions that incorporate many of the current critical approaches present in the theory of autobiography, these essays show the vitality of southern life-writing. The flexibility of the term life-writing, which now covers a wide range of autobiographical acts, the memoir boom and the impact at the turn of the millennium of what Leigh Gilmore calls “a culture of testimony” in The Limits of Autobiography (2) have certainly influenced the many and varied forms of recent southern life-writing. This volume, therefore, includes not only discussions of canonical black autobiography and classical autobiographies by black and white authors, but also poetry, as well as different varieties of memoirs—memoirs written for performance, family memoirs, autoethnographies, political memoirs, travel memoirs, and examples of the new memoir of disease and disability. This collection of essays also incorporates the personal reflections of a southern memoirist who felt the urge to write her own life story after the death of her mother.