Description

This book brings together a group of women interested in, even consumed by, the region they inhabit physically or mentally. All of them search for a language that will accurately represent their life experiences, whether at a remote plantation in antebellum Georgia or in an Alabama institution for the criminally insane. This book contains critical essays on the autobiographical writings of southern women from the past and present, and women well-known such as Mary Chesnut, Fanny Kemble and Alice Walker, to those less well-known such as Kate Stone. The self-narratives critiqued in this volume propel themselves and their authors to the center of critical debates concerning the status of the subject, the nature of self-representation, the globalization of the regional, cultural hybridities, and the negotiations and compromises required for co-existence. Read through theoretical lenses, their texts map new representational spaces, alternative (textual) bodies, and reinventions of categories such as "region," "race," and "women."