Bøger i Life Writing serien

This book showcases a unique, innovative form for contemporary life narrative scholarship. It positions the essay as a unique nexus of creative and critical practice.

This volume is the first to approach Tibetan life writing from a literary and narratological perspective, encompassing a wide range of disciplines, themes, media, and historical periods, and thus opening new and vibrant areas of research to future scholarship across the Humanities.

How did a privileged Victorian matron, newly widowed and newly impoverished, manage to raise and educate her six young children and restore her family to social prominence? Mary Baker McQuesten's personal letters, 155 of which were carefully selected by Mary J. Anderson, tell the story. In her uninhibited style, in letters mostly to her children, Mary Baker McQuesten chronicles her financial struggles and her expectations. The letters reveal her forthright opinions on a broad range of topics - politics, religion, literature, social sciences, and even local gossip. We learn how Mary assessed each of her children's strengths and weaknesses, and directed each of their lives for the good of the family. For example, she sent her daughter Ruby out to teach, so she could send her earnings home to educate Thomas, the son Mary felt was most likely to succeed. And succeed he did, as a lawyer and mpp, helping to build many of Hamilton's and Ontario's highways, bridges, parks, and heritage sites, and in doing so, bringing the family back to social prominence. Mary Baker McQuesten was also president of the Women's Missionary Society. The appearance, manner, and eloquence of various ministers and politicians all come under her uninhibited scrutiny, providing lively insights into the Victorian moral and social motivations of both men and women and about the gender conflicts that occurred both at home and abroad. This book will satisfy many readers. Those interested in the drama of Victorian society will enjoy the images of the stern Presbyterian matriarch, the sacrificed female, family mental illness, the unresolved death of a husband, and the dangers of social stigma. Scholars looking for research material will find an abundance in the letters, well annotated with details of the surrounding political, social, and current events of the times.

"Where do you come from?" When Vijay Agnew first immigrated to Canada people would often ask her "Where do you come from?" She thought it a simple, straightforward question, and would answer in the same simple, straightforward manner, by telling them where she had been born and where she grew up. But over the years she learned that many so-called third-world people resent being asked this question, because it implies that having a different skin colour (which is what usually prompts the question) makes a person an outsider and not really Canadian. This realization inspired her to look more closely at the question - and the answer. The result is this book. Where I Come From is a reflective memoir of an immigrant professor's life in a Canadian university. It covers the period from 1967, when Canada was opened up to third-world immigrants, to the present. The book illustrates the ways in which identity is socially constructed by tracing some of the labels that were applied to the author at various stages during her thirty years in Canada - "foreign student," "Indian woman," "immigrant," "Indian feminist," and "third-world woman." She shows how each of these names has affected her relationships with other people and contributed to making her the woman she is now perceived to be: a feminist, anti-racist, activist professor. This multilayered story reveals the complex ways in which race, class, and gender intersect in an immigrant woman's life, and engages readers in a conversation that narrows the distance between them, showing not only what is different, but what is shared.

How does the imagination entwine the shreds of memory of family, place and culture to root a self in the fluid experience of the present? Daughter, wife, mother, teacher, writer and academic, Helen Buss/Margaret Clarke has lived in many parts of Canada and writes from a life of multiple perspectives full of contradictory loyalties and obligations.

January 21, 1995: Dorothy Joudrie is arrested for attempting to murder her estranged husband. Soon after, Audrey Andrews begins to write her book. Audrey and Dorothy had known each other as children, but the identification of Andrews with Joudrie goes beyond merely the accident of a childhood acquaintance. It has to do with being subjected to the same societal constraints placed on girls and women during the years immediately following World War II, the years in which they had prepared for their adult lives. Expectations, placidly accepted then, are now seen as unrealistic and unreasonable. Did these expectations have some part in causing the tragedy in Dorothy Joudries life? When Andrews attempted to understand why Dorothy Joudrie had tried to kill her husband, and to write Joudries story, she began to examine her own life, her own expectations those she had of herself and those others had of her. She also realized that telling the story of anyone is an intricate and often ephemeral pursuit. Any story she wrote could only be her version of Joudries experience. Nevertheless, it was important to be as honest as she could about her interpretation of that life. She determined to show carefully and accurately the damage that had been done to one woman damage that is still being done to many others through prejudice, attitudes, traditions and the institutions that are still the foundation of our society, and of our lives, everyday. The result is a fascinating account of events leading up to the trial, the trial itself and the effect of Joudries trial on the life of Audrey Andrews.

A collection of the writings of an articulate woman who is both ordinary and extraordinary. She paints a vivid picture of the joys and hardships of growing up on a pioneer farm in Canada during the last century and documents her spiritual and educational quests and conquests.

It s an autobiography! If I tell you what s in it you won t read the book. Claire Drainie Taylor Or would you? Maybe you d be intrigued by the progression of a life begun as an unexceptional little girl born to a middle-class Jewish Canadian couple in a small prairie town who, at age sixteen, married a refined Englishman, and survived the Great Depression, partly alone in a shack in the woods of Vancouver Island. Or how, only a few months after returning to Vancouver, with no training and minimal education, this same young woman walked on stage at one of Canada s finest old theatres, and went on to a successful thirty-year career as an actress and radio dialogue writer. Having been compelled by her family to write her memoir, it wasn t until she d finished and reread her manuscript that Claire Drainie Taylor realized what an extraordinary life she d led. Her descriptions of the many fascinating incidents that make up her story, and how she dealt with them, revealed herself to herself in a way that illuminates what she calls The Surprise of My Life.

In letters written to the children's pages of newspapers, we hear the clear and authentic voices of real children who lived in rural Canada and Newfoundland between 1900 and 1920. Children tell us about their families, their schools, jobs and communities and the suffering caused by the terrible costs of World War I.

This evocative narrative draws us into the inner life of a young Chinese peasant girl, May-ping, and her first glimmerings of youthful love and idealism under the Maoist regime in China. As she grows into a mature woman, she becomes increasingly aware of the strife around her. An intelligent girl born into a Poor-Class family in a small village in rural China, she is, because of the Maoist policy towards such families, able to pursue her dream of going to university. To her surprise, urban snobbery and "student thought-spying" at university make it essential for her to hide her real thoughts. Such self-protection becomes especially necessary once her idealistic boyfriend Dan â a secret boyfriend because young people were forbidden to be romantically involved â is sent to a labour camp for his outspoken ways. In her village, she learns that everything has value except the lives of girls and women. One of her childhood friends, a landowner's daughter who because of her family's Landlord Class, is not allowed to go to university drowns herself when forced to face an arranged marriage. Hua-Hua, a shy and gentle neighbour, hangs herself after her husband beats her brutally for not bearing him a son. May-ping manages to survive the Cultural Revolution as a member of the Communist party who feels outside the system and keeps her inner self intact. Her story reveals how political change during the Maoist regime left its mark on ordinary people. Employing stories within stories, the narrator carries the reader to a mythological realm to images of the resilient water lilies and the nurturing lily pond.

"Dour Scot" is the wrong description for David Caldow, who leads readers on a romp from the early twentieth century to the present, from an insular Scottish village to modern-day, multicultural British Columbia, from boyhood to old age. Throughout the tour he shares decades of laughter, tears, fears, and growth.

What comes to mind when we hear that a friend or colleague is studying unpublished documents in a celebrated author's archive? We might assume that they are reading factual documents or, at the very least, straightforward accounts of the truth about someone or some event. But are they? Working in Women's Archives is a collection of essays that poses this question and offers a variety of answers. Any assumption readers may have about the archive as a neutral library space or about the archival document as a simple and pure text is challenged. In essays discussing celebrated Canadian authors such as Marian Engel and L.M. Montgomery, as well as lesser-known writers such as Constance Kerr Sissons and Marie Rose Smith, Working in Women's Archives persuades us that our research methods must be revised and refined in order to create a scholarly place for a greater variety of archival subjects and to accurately represent them in current feminist and poststructuralist theories.

Shirley Jane Endicott presents a fascinating account of her mother's life, based on Mary Austin Endicott's private writings and flavoured with Shirley's memories. She brings to life the story of an exceptional woman whose life was shaped by profound political and historical circumstances.

This edited collection considers the ways older women¿s life narratives redefine culturally imposed conceptions of what it means to grow older.

Deeply informed by archival research and current scholarship, but written as a reflective and intimate memoir, What the Oceans Remember addresses current issues in migration, identity, belonging, and history through an interrogation of race, ethnicity, gender, archives and memory.

This collection brings together a series of essays that combine the public and private nature of dissent, stories of dissent that encapsulate the mood of an historical or cultural period, or of a society. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

Contributions to this book analyse material from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, including biography, auto/biographical memoirs, letters, diaries, sermons, maps and directories. It was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

Contributions to this book analyse material from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, including biography, auto/biographical memoirs, letters, diaries, sermons, maps and directories, and the book closes with reflections and poems by contemporary life writers. It was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

Chronicles life stories of growing up in Jamaica from 1943 to 1965 and contains both personal experience and history, told with stridency and humour. The author's coming of age parallels the political stages of Jamaica's moving from the richest Crown colony of Great Britain to an independent nation.

This book sets a new agenda for studies in trauma narrative by establishing dialogues between some of the existing and traditional subjects, locations and methodologies of trauma study and other contexts, histories and memories that have remained obscured to date.

This volume is the first to approach Tibetan life writing from a literary and narratological perspective, encompassing a wide range of disciplines, themes, media, and historical periods, and thus opening new and vibrant areas of research to future scholarship across the Humanities.

This edited collection considers the ways older women's life narratives redefine culturally imposed conceptions of what it means to grow older.

This volume applies the insight and methods of career construction theory to explore how autobiographical writing is used in different professional careers, from fiction and journalism to education and medicine.

In this volume, scholars from a number of academic disciplines illuminate how a range of philosophers and other thoughtful individuals addressed the complex issues surrounding philosophy and life writing. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

In the age of social media, life writing is everywhere. But does this mean that life is limitless? The Limits of Life Writing offers new insights into life writing by attending to the limits that are approached and sometimes crossed by contemporary writers. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

This volume explores narratives of illness and disability using the latest critical theories and through the perspectives of patients, creative writers, and academics. It examines the intersection of trauma and disability and the ethical dimensions of narrative. It was first published as a special issue of Life Writing.