Why does it seem as if everyone is writing memoirs, and particularly women?
The current popularity of memoir verifies the common belief that we each have a story to tell. And we do...especially women. Memoirs are not only representations of women’s personal lives but also of their desire to repossess important parts of our culture, in which women’s stories have not mattered.
Beginning with her own motivations for writing memoirs, Helen M. Buss examines the many kinds of memoir written by contemporary women: memoirs about growing up, memoirs about traumatic events, about relationships, about work. In writing memoirs, these women publicly assert that their lives have mattered. They reshape the memoir, a form as old as the middle ages and as young as today, into a social discourse that blends the personal with the political, the self with the significant other, literature with history, and fiction with autobiography and essay. Buss urges readers to use their reading experience to help themselves understand and write the significance of their own lives.
Repossessing the World is the first book-length critical inquiry into women’s use of a form that has often been dismissed as less important than autobiography, less professional than the novel, and less intellectual than the formal essay. Buss demonstrates that the memoir makes its own art, not only through selective borrowing from these genres but also through the unique way that the tripartite narrative voice of the memoir constructs the personal and public experience of the memorist as significant to our cultural moment.
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Helen M. Buss is a professor of English at the University of Calgary. Her book on Canadian women's life writing, Mapping Our Selves, won the Gabrielle Roy Prize. As Margaret Clarke, she has published novels, short stories and poetry.
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. First Edition. Stiff new looking book in glossy dust jacket. Pencilling (only) scattered through selected chapters. ; Life Writing; 9.0 X 6.0 X 0.5 inches; 231 pages. Seller Inventory # 53317
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Very Good+. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good+. Canadian First. Minimal wear; otherwise a solid, clean copy with no marking or underlining; collectible condition; 206 pages. Book. Seller Inventory # 024203
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: As new. Dust Jacket Condition: As new. Life Writing Series. xxv, 206p. 23.5 cm. Gray cloth hardcover binding with copper lettering on spine. Pictorial dustjacket. No discernible wear. Pages clean. Helen M. Buss (aka Margaret Clarke) is a professor with the Department of English at the University of Calgary. Contents: An Autobiographical Preface: Writing As a Memoirist; Introduction; Memoir With an Attitude; Identity As a Balancing Act; Dancing with Our Mothers; "Scenes of Language"; Joining Heart and Head; Repossessing a Relational Autonomy. Seller Inventory # 114089