Diaries and Journals of Literary Women from Fanny Burney to Virginia Woolf


Book Description

This highly original book investigates the part played by their personal writings in the lives of eight literary women. Can private journals provide information about their authors' public works? Do diaries dramatise the development of an individual literary `voice'? What was the special attraction of the diary form for women, and why has it been so undervalued? Drawing on current feminist critical approaches, Judy Simons explores these and other questions in a stimulating and wide-ranging study of women's diary writing, which revises our entire way of thinking about this traditionally neglected genre and its particular implications for the woman writer.







Lacework or Mirror? Diary Poetics of Frances Burney, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley


Book Description

Lacework or Mirror? Diary Poetics of Frances Burney, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley sets out to determine whether each of the diaries by three female writers – namely, Frances Burney, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley – approximates the Philippe-Lejeunean concept of the diary as lacework or the more sweeping view, typical of the broadly conceived autobiography, which Georges Gusdorf famously likened to the mirror. The author explores Burney’s, Wordsworth’s and Shelley’s attempts at concealing the gaps between their narrating and narrated ‘I’s, as well as examining their diary lacunae, especially helpful for illustrating the gradual emergence of the diarists’ individual selves. Broader issues, connected with diary poetics, such as the use of metaphors and symbols, the degree of reliance on dialogue and ensuing narrativity, down to handling the past by means of anachronous eccentricities, are also subject to examination. The study is based on the assumption that the journal is a literary genre, which can be investigated with tools routinely used for the examination of literary texts. Yet, beyond the issues of literariness, in accordance with Philippe Lejeune’s dictum, the three journals reveal the writers’ diaristic practices. In fact, it seems that issues of the journal genre and the journal practice cannot be divorced, and neither can their lacework and mirror aspects.




Women's Diaries as Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century Novel


Book Description

Using private diary writing as her model, Catherine Delafield investigates the cultural significance of nineteenth-century women's writing and reading practices. Beginning with an examination of non-fictional diaries and the practice of diary-writing, she assesses the interaction between the fictional diary and other forms of literary production such as epistolary narrative, the periodical, the factual document and sensation fiction. The discrepancies between the private diary and its use as a narrative device are explored through the writings of Frances Burney, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anne Brontë, Dinah Craik, Wilkie Collins and Bram Stoker. The ideological function of the diary, Delafield suggests, produces a conflict in fictional narrative between that diary's received use as a domestic and spiritual record and its authority as a life-writing opportunity for women. Delafield considers women as writers, readers, and subjects and contextualizes her analysis within nineteenth-century reading practice. She demonstrates ways in which women could becomes performers of their own story through a narrative method which was authorized by their femininity and at the same time allowed them to challenge the myth of domestic womanhood.




Diaries of Girls and Women


Book Description

Diaries of Girls and Women captures and preserves the diverse lives of forty-seven girls and women who lived in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin between 1837 and 1999—young schoolgirls, adolescents coming of age, newlywed wives, mothers grieving the loss of children, teachers, nurses, elderly women, Luxembourger immigrant nuns, and women traveling abroad. A compelling work of living history, it brings together both diaries from historical society archives and diaries still in possession of the diarists or their descendents. Editor Suzanne L. Bunkers has selected these excerpts from more than 450 diaries she examined. Some diaries were kept only briefly, others through an entire lifetime; some diaries are the intensely private record of a life, others tell the story of an entire family and were meant to be saved and appreciated by future generations. By approaching diaries as historical documents, therapeutic tools, and a form of literature, Bunkers offers readers insight into the self-images of girls and women, the dynamics of families and communities, and the kinds of contributions that girls and women have made, past and present. As a representation of the girls and women of varied historical eras, locales, races, and economic circumstances who settled and populated the Midwest, Diaries of Girls and Women adds texture and pattern to the fabric of American history.




A Celebration of Frances Burney


Book Description

On the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the writer Frances Burney (1752–1840), a window to her memory was placed in the arched recess of stained glass that graces Poets’ Corner. Novelist, playwright and diarist, Frances Burney is one of the few women accorded such an honour. She joins the likes of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot who might in some ways be seen as her literary heirs. Burney’s journey to recognition on the stage of the world has been a long one, crowned finally with triumph. The service marked the mid-point of a two-day conference in which various aspects of Burney’s life and achievement were canvassed. Her journals and letters, her novels and plays (both comedies and tragedies), her life, family and context were all given serious scholarly treatment. This volume includes the papers presented at the conference, which cover the many facets of a remarkable career and represent the broad spectrum of scholarly approaches to the entire opus of Frances Burney. It shows how far Burney has come from being dismissed as a minor precursor to Jane Austen to being recognized in her own right as a powerful, complex and influential writer, whose works had considerable impact on her own and subsequent generations.




British Women Writers, 1700-1850


Book Description

A guide to British women authors, their works, and the writing about them.




Reader's Guide to British History


Book Description

The Reader's Guide to British History is the essential source to secondary material on British history. This resource contains over 1,000 A-Z entries on the history of Britain, from ancient and Roman Britain to the present day. Each entry lists 6-12 of the best-known books on the subject, then discusses those works in an essay of 800 to 1,000 words prepared by an expert in the field. The essays provide advice on the range and depth of coverage as well as the emphasis and point of view espoused in each publication.




Encyclopedia of Life Writing


Book Description

First published in 2001. This is the first substantial reference work in English on the various forms that constitute "life writing." As this term suggests, the Encyclopedia explores not only autobiography and biography proper, but also letters, diaries, memoirs, family histories, case histories, and other ways in which individual lives have been recorded and structured. It includes entries on genres and subgenres, national and regional traditions from around the world, and important auto-biographical writers, as well as articles on related areas such as oral history, anthropology, testimonies, and the representation of life stories in non-verbal art forms.




Marginal Voices, Marginal Forms


Book Description

Diaristic writing has often been relegated to the fringes of literary studies as a marginal cultural activity. This volume seeks to challenge that marginality by exploring some of the wide-ranging forms of literary practice encompassed by diaristic writing in Europe from the Renaissance to the present day. The volume deals with questions of the value and status of the diary, of the functioning of the diary in society and history, and of the reception and interpretation of the multifarious forms of first-person daily writing. The volume investigates diaries across national borders and linguistic boundaries, so as to make the hitherto marginal place of the private journal a site of fruitful interdisciplinary encounters. Australian, British, Catalonian, French, German and Italian critics examine diaries dating from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, within the context of the literature, history and literary history of Catalonia, England, France, Germany and Italy. A prime concern of the essays in this collection is to highlight the cultural, generic and historical diversity of the diary, while emphasising the points of convergence between different texts and differing critical approaches to the texts. The volume will be of interest to students and teachers of European and comparative literature.




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