Women's writing and the self

Abstract

Academic interest in what is variously referred to as ‘autobiography’, ‘self-writing’, ‘life-history narrative’, ‘life-story writing’ and ‘auto/biography’ has grown enormously over the last twenty years. The variety of terms used to designate this form of writing and the debates over the implications of these terms point to the cluster of fascinations and anxieties that are focused on it. Since any fundamental definition of autobiography identifies it as the life or life-history of the self who is writing, the form brings into conjunction precisely those terms and concepts that have most preoccupied philosophers, social scientists, historians and literary critics in the past few decades. The notion of the self is a troubled one. What constitutes identity or selfhood, or (more recently) subjectivity is, as Liz Stanley puts it, one of ‘the major epistemological issues of our time’. What constitutes a ‘life’ or ‘life-history’ and how selfhood is related to ‘life-history’ and to writing or, more generally, language, are equally contentious matters. The study of autobiography has come to be associated not only with autobiographies themselves, with the nature of the genre and the difficult and puzzling issues inherent in identification of it as a genre, but serves, too, as a place where the assumptions underlying disciplinary divisions and concerns can be explored or questioned or affirmed.

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