"Through the Long Corridor of Distance": Space and Self in Contemporary New Zealand Women S Autobiographies

ISBN-13: 9789042038684 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 156 str.

Valerie Baisnee

Opis

Examined in this study are twentieth- and twenty-first century autobiographies and memoirs by major New Zealand women writers. Brought together for the first time in a single study, texts by Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Janet Frame, Lauris Edmond, Fiona Kidman, Barbara Anderson, Ruth Park, and Ruth Dallas are analysed with the aid of spatial concepts that probe unexplored aspects of their life-narratives. Drawing on recent and revised concepts of place and space in cultural geography, philosophy, and sociology, the book ac-knowledges the link between identities and locations in a non-essentialist way by pinpointing the various forms of inhabit-ing and being in space. It refutes the idea of autobiographies as pure self-referential texts, and shows how these works deploy their own horizon of reference.