Search results for ""Author Lorna Martens""

As Told by Herself offers the first systematic study of women's autobiographical writing about childhood. More than 175 works—primarily from English-speaking countries and France, as well as other European countries—are presented here in historical sequence, allowing Lorna Martens to discern and reveal patterns as they emerge and change over time. What do the authors divulge, conceal, and emphasize? How do they understand the experience of growing up as girls? How do they understand themselves as parts of family or social groups, and what role do other individuals play in their recollections? To what extent do they concern themselves with issues of memory, truth, and fictionalization? Stopping just before second-wave feminism brought an explosion in women's childhood autobiographical writing, As Told by Herself explores the genre's roots and development from the mid-nineteenth century, and recovers many works that have been neglected or forgotten. The result illustrates how previous generations of women—in a variety of places and circumstances—understood themselves and their upbringing, and how they thought to present themselves to contemporary and future readers.

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Intellectual culture in early twentieth-century Austria reached levels of originality and excellence that have rarely been equalled before or since. Shadow Lines examines works by major novelists, dramatists, poets, and intellectuals of that extraordinary era—among them, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Franz Kafka. Lorna Martens considers how each of these authors contributed to a decisive transformation in Austrian culture, involving a shift away from the dialectical syntheses of much nineteenth-century German thought and culture to potent, unresolvable dualisms of known and unknown—orderly and chaotic—features of human experience: consciousness and the unconscious, reason and the irrational, language and the inexpressible. In most of these writers, according to Martens, all that is knowable, reasonable, and orderly is grounded in that which is dark, irrational, chaotic. What Martens calls “the dark area” emerges variously “as the unconscious (Freud), the sexual drive (Freud, Schnitzler, Musil), the death instinct (Freud, Schnitzler), the dangerous chaos below the surface of things (Rilke), the inaccessible totality (von Hofmannsthal), or the unsayable (Mauthner, von Hofmannsthal, Musil, Wittgenstein).” The essential yet enigmatic relation between the known and the unknown leads to much that is unsettling—and strangely fascinating—in these writers’ works. A book that shrewdly relates the works of these authors to the intellectual and political turmoil of the times, Shadow Lines is a new critical appraisal of Austrian literature and intellectual culture at the dawn of the century.

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