Text and Image in Women's Life Writing: Picturing the Female Self (Palgrave Studies in Life Writing)

This book examines the relationship between words and images in various life-writing works produced by nineteenth to twenty-first century American and British women. It addresses the politics of images in women’s life writing, contending that the presence or absence of images is often strategic. Including a range of different forms of life writing, chapters draw on traditional (auto)biographies, travel narratives, memoirs, diaries, autofiction, cancer narratives, graphic memoirs, artistic installations, quilts and online performances, as life writing moves from page to screen and other media. The book explores a wide range of women who have crossed the boundary between text and image: painters who have become writers, novelists who have become painters, writers who hesitate between images and words, models who seize the camera, and artists who use the frame as a page.

Valérie Baisnée-Keay is Associate Professor in English at the University of Paris Saclay, Paris, France.

Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni is Associate Professor at Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, France.

Corinne Bigot is Associate Professor in Postcolonial Literature at Université Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès, France.

Claire Bazin is Professor of 19th-Century English and Commonwealth Literature at Paris Nanterre University, France.