Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice (Theory / Culture)

Kadar, Marlene - editor

ISBN 10: 0802067832 / ISBN 13: 9780802067838

Published by University of Toronto Press, Toronto Buffalo London, 1992

About this Item

234 pp, Essays by editor and contributors. With notes and references. Mostly Women. Only the slightest sign of prior use. Unmarked, tight, uncreased. Size: Small Octavo.

Seller Inventory # 010065

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice (Theory / Culture)
• Publisher: University of Toronto Press, Toronto Buffalo London
• Publication Date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802067832
• ISBN 13: 9780802067838
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: Trade Paperback.
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Book Type: Book
• Seller catalogs:
  • LITERARY CRITICISM

About this title

Synopsis

Life writing is the most flexible and open term available for autobiographical fragments and other kinds of autobiographical-seeming texts. It includes the conventional genres of autobiography, journals, memoirs, letters, testimonies, and metafiction, and in earlier definitions it included biography. It is a way of seeing literary and other texts that neither objectifies nor subjectifies the nature of a particular cultural truth.

Marlene Kadar has brought together an interdisciplinary and comparative collection of critical and theoretical essays by diverse Canadian scholars, most of whom are women engaged in larger projects in life writing or in archival research. In the more practical pieces the author has discerned a pattern in autobiographical text, or subtext, that has come to revolutionize the life, the critic’s approach, or the discipline itself. In the theoretical pieces, authors make cogent proposals to view a body of literature in a new way, often in order to incorporate feminist visions or humanistic interpretations.

The contributors represent a broad range of scholars from disciplines within the humanities and beyond. Collectively they provide an impressive overview of a growing field of scholarship.

About the Author

Marlene Kadar is Canada Research Fellow and Assistant Professor in the Humanities Division and at the Robarts Centre of Canadian Studies, York University.