These original essays comprise a fascinating investigation into women's strategies for writing the self constructing the female subject through autobiography, memoirs, letters, and diaries. The collection contains theoretical essays by Donna Stanton, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gilbert, and Susan Gubar; chapters on specific issues raised by women's autographs, such as Richard Bowring's study of tenth-century Japanese diaries or Janel Mueller's on "The Book of Margery Kempe"; and annotated autobiographical fragments, including texts by Julia Kristeva, by a woman who became a czarist cavalry...

Feminisms in the Academy explores the relationship between feminist scholarship and the other academic disciplines. Going beyond the conventional "mainstreaming" model which may tend to polarize and caricature positions, the essays employ existing epistemological and methodological tensions to generate productive dialogues within and among the humanities and social sciences, as well as in interdisciplinary areas such as African-American and Latina studies.
Part I, "Questioning the Disciplines," addresses the challenges that feminist scholarship poses to unexamined assumptions in...