Description
Book SynopsisThis 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.
Trade Review“Text and Image in Women's Life Writing is an impressive collection that admirably achieves its purpose ‘to contribute to the ongoing conversation on text, image, and gender’ … . It will be of special interest to H-Biography network members and others … . For those of us involved in the practice of women’s biography, this volume grapples with and provides insights about four highly pertinent areas, namely, identity, memory, referentiality and embodiment.” (Josephine May, H-Net Reviews, h-net.org, April, 2022)
Table of ContentsIntroduction - Valérie Baisnée-Keay
Part One: Image-ing Identity
1 Thinking through the Book and Reimagining the Page: Julie Chen’s Artists’ Books and Faith Ringgold’s Story Quilts - Hertha D. Wong
2 ‘[Un]systematic, even with the image’: Text-image Blurring, Self-Inquiry and Ontological Anxiety in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s works - Marie-Agnès Gay
3 A Visual-Verbal-Virtual Redefinition of Womanhood by Janet Mock - Aurelia Mouzet
4 Authoritatively Her/Self: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Life Writing - Edyta Frelik
Part Two: Reframing Memories
5 Fun Homes and Queer Houses of Memory in Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Memoirs - Heloise Thomas
6 Framing herself then and now: Shirley Geok-lin Lim and the Evolving Practice of Photo Albums - Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni
7 Nostalgic Albums or Alternative Lieux de mémoire? The interplay between stories, photographs, and illustrated recipes in ethnic culinary memoirs by women - Corinne Bigot Part Three: Elusive Textual/Visual Referentiality
8 Zelda Fitzgerald’s Self-Portraiture: A Strenuous Performance from Ink to Gouache - Elisabeth Bouzonviller
9 Isabella Bird-Bishop’s 1897 journey up the Yangtze Valley and Beyond: Beyond the Writing/ Photographing Divide - Floriane Reviron-Piégay
10 A Woman’s Life of War Pictures: Elizabeth Butler (1846-1933) - Nathalie Saudo-Welby
11 Whistler’s (Mother’s) Daughter: Image-Text Relations in Marilyn French’s Fictionalized (Auto)biography - Stephanie Genty
Part Four: Visual/Textual Embodiment
12 It Is Difficult to Find the Words”: The Image-Text Interface in Lynn Kohlman’s Cancer Auto/biography - Marta Fernández-Morales
13 Creating Together an ‘Unexpected Home’: Navigating the Matrixial Borderspace through Text and Image in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–79) - Justyna Wierzchowska
