Women's Life Writing and Imagined Communities [Hardcover]

This book recognises the great legacy of Women's life writings. They provide an incomparable window into the various cultural and historical communities in which we live. Drawing from novels, memoirs, autobiographies, letters, religious records and many other sources, from many of the finest female writers in history, we critically examine how these writings both reflect and shape our communities.

These writings are such that we can draw great insight into fields from cultural studies to feminism, postmodernism and new historicism. This is a Special issue of the Journal Prose Studies.

Notes on Contrthutors -- Acknowledgments -- Towards a geography of women's life writing and imagined communities : an introductory essay /Cynthia Huff -- Imagined ancestral communities of displaced Australian daughters : Evelyn Crawford's Over My Tracks and Lily Brett's After the War and Unintended Consequences /Gay Breyley -- The community of camp sisters : bonds of support, bonds of subversion /Deborah Lee Ames -- Imagining an hospitable community in the deportation narratives of Baltic women /Leena Kurvet-Kaosaar -- Imagining sweet fellowship : resisting prejudice with spiritual transcendence in Jarena Lee's imagined community /Jeryl J. Prescott -- Reverse migrations and imagined communities /Manuela Costantino and Susanna Egan -- Somewhere between Puerto Rico and New York : the representation of individual and collective identities in Esmeralda Santiago's When I was Puerto Rican and Almost a woman /Marta Vizcaya Echano -- Dear (embodied) reader : life writing and disability /Susannah B. Mintz -- Prei for me mi leue suster : the paradox of the anchoritic community in late medieval England /Michelle M. Sauer -- Collaborative life writing as ideology : the auto /biographies of Mary Howitt and her family /Linda H. Peterson -- We are the web : letter writing and the 1980s women's peace movement /Margaretta Jolly -- Consuming lives, creating lÃ$