In Composing Selves, award-winning author Peggy Whitman Prenshaw provides the most comprehensive treatment of autobiographies by women in the American South. This long-anticipated addition to Prenshaw's study of southern literature spans the twentieth century as she provides an in-depth look at the life-writing of eighteen women authors. Composing Selves travels the wide terrain of female life in the South, analyzing various issues that range from racial consciousness to the deflection of personal achievement. All of the authors presented came of age during the era Prenshaw refers to as the "late southern Victorian period," which began in 1861 and ended in the 1930s. Belle Kearney's A Slaveholder's Daughter (1900) with Elizabeth Spencer's Landscapes of the Heart and Ellen Douglas's Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell (both published in 1998) chronologically bookend Prenshaw's survey. She includes Ellen Glasgow's The Woman Within, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's Cross Creek, Bernice Kelly Harris's Southern Savory, and Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road. The book also examines Katharine DuPre Lumpkin's The Making of a Southerner and Lillian Smith's Killers of the Dream. In addition to exploring multiple themes, Prenshaw considers a number of types of autobiographies, such as Helen Keller's classic The Story of My Life and Anne Walter Fearn's My Days of Strength. She treats narratives of marital identity, as in Mary Hamilton's Trials of the Earth, and calls attention to works by women who devoted their lives to social and political movements, like Virginia Durr's Outside the Magic Circle. Drawing on many notable authors and on Prenshaw's own life of scholarship, Composing Selves provides an invaluable contribution to the study of southern literature, autobiography, and the work of southern women writers.

University Writing: Selves and Texts in Academic Societies examines new trends in the different theoretical perspectives (cognitive, social and cultural) and derived practices in the activity of writing in higher education. These perspectives are analyzed on the basis of their conceptualization of the object - academic and scientific writing; of the writers - their identities, attitudes and perspectives, be it students, teachers or researchers; and of the derived instructional practices - the ways in which the teaching-learning situations may be organized. The volume samples writing research traditions and perspectives both in Europe and the United States, working on their situated nature and avoiding easy or superficial comparisons in order to enlarge our understanding of common problems and some emerging possibilities.

Linking autobiographic writings by Korean women in Japan and the United States and the author's ethnographic insights, Writing Selves in Diaspora presents an original, profound, and powerful intervention—both literary and anthropological—in our understanding of life in diaspora, being female, and forming selves. Each chapter offers unique and original discussion on the intersection between gender and diaspora on one hand and the process of the self's formation on the other. Chapters are mutually engaging, yet have independent themes to explore: language and self, romantic love, exile and totalitarianism, the ethic of care, and critique of medicalization of identity. Through the introduction of women's lives and introspection and interpretation accorded to them, this book delivers an unprecedented text of candor and courage. This book will have appeal for both academic and intellectually-informed lay readers interested in gender, self, and diaspora.

Writing Selves in Diaspora is a work born out of long-term fieldwork by the author, Sonia Ryang, in Japan and the United States, spanning more than one and a half decades. It offers an unprecedented insight into Korean women's lives and their formation of self in diaspora in J...

Writing is not just about conveying 'content' but also about the representation of self. (One of the reasons people find writing difficult is that they do not feel comfortable with the 'me' they are portraying in their writing. Academic writing in particular often poses a conflict of identity for students in higher education, because the 'self' which is inscribed in academic discourse feels alien to them.)The main claim of this book is that writing is an act of identity in which people align themselves with socio-culturally shaped subject positions, and thereby play their part in reproducing or challenging dominant practices and discourses, and the values, beliefs and interests which they embody. The first part of the book reviews recent understandings of social identity, of the discoursal construction of identity, of literacy and identity, and of issues of identity in research on academic writing. The main part of the book is based on a collaborative research project about writing and identity with mature-age students, providing: - a case study of one writer's dilemmas over the presentation of self;- a discussion of the way in which writers' life histories shape their presentation of self in writing;- an interview-based study of issues of ownership, and of accommodation and resistance to conventions for the presentation of self;- linguistic analysis of the ways in which multiple, often contradictory, interests, values, beliefs and practices are inscribed in discourse conventions, which set up a range of possibilities for self-hood for writers.The book ends with implications of the study for research on writing and identity, and for the learning and teaching of academic writing.The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of social identity, literacy, discourse analysis, rhetoric and composition studies, and to all those concerned to understand what is involved in academic writing in order to provide wider access to higher education.