The life narratives in this collection are by ethnically diverse women of energy and ambition--some well known, some forgotten over generations--who confronted barriers of gender, class, race, and sexual difference as they pursued or adapted to adventurous new lives in a rapidly changing America. The engaging selections--from captivity narratives to letters, manifestos, criminal confessions, and childhood sketches--span a hundred years in which women increasingly asserted themselves publicly. Some rose to positions of prominence as writers, activists, and artists; some sought education or...

Modern and contemporary women's artistic production of autobiography frequently occurs at the interfaces of image and text. The many permutations of words and images in all their modes of production--photograph, pose, invocation, written narrative, sculpture, dance, diatribe--create countless possibilities of expression, and this volume charts some of the ways in which women artists are seizing these possibilities.
Editors Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have been at the vanguard of the study of women's self-representation, and here have collected leading critics' and scholars' thoughts on...

The Olympics thrill the world with spectacle and drama. They also carry a cultural and social significance that goes beyond the stadium, athletes, and fans. The Games are arenas in which individual and team athletic achievement intersect with the politics of national identity in a global context.
The Olympics at the Millennium offers groundbreaking essays that explore the cultural politics of the Games. The contributors investigate such topics as the emergence of women athletes as cultural commodities, the orchestrated spectacles of the opening and closing ceremonies, and the...

Looks at the complexities of identity in the context of contemporary European culture.

Various encounters helped us transform what was originally just a response to a trendy 1980s phrase--Get A life!--into the pointed yet heterogeneous engagement with everyday practices that we believe this collection represents. Papers submitted for the session on the everyday uses of autobiography at the Modern Language Association's convention in 1992 enabled us to connect with scholars around the country.

As technological advances increased the ease, speed, and reach of transportation, more and more women took to the air, to the road and the rail, and headed for points elsewhere. As they mastered new modes of mobility and then narrated their journeys, these women travelers left cultural ideas of femininity as sedentary, subordinate, and constrained in the dust. In Moving Lives Sidonie Smith explores how women's travel and travel writing in the twentieth century were shaped by particular modes of mobility, asking how the form of travel affected the kind of narrative written.

Alexandra...

As technological advances increased the ease, speed, and reach of transportation, more and more women took to the air, to the road and the rail, and headed for points elsewhere. As they mastered new modes of mobility and then narrated their journeys, these women travelers left cultural ideas of femininity as sedentary, subordinate, and constrained in the dust. In Moving Lives Sidonie Smith explores how women's travel and travel writing in the twentieth century were shaped by particular modes of mobility, asking how the form of travel affected the kind of narrative written.

Alexandra...

Personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims across the world. These two contemporary domains, personal narrative and human rights, literature and international politics, are commonly understood to operate on separate planes. This study however, examines the ways these intersecting realms unfold and are enfolded in one another in ways both productive of and problematic for the achievement of social justice. Human Rights and Narrated Lives explores what happens when autobiographical narratives are produced, received, and circulated in the...

Personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims across the world. These two contemporary domains, personal narrative and human rights, literature and international politics, are commonly understood to operate on separate planes. This study however, examines the ways these intersecting realms unfold and are enfolded in one another in ways both productive of and problematic for the achievement of social justice. Human Rights and Narrated Lives explores what happens when autobiographical narratives are produced, received, and circulated in the...