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This is the first full-length study to explore Simone de Beauvoir's autobiographical and biographical writings in the context of her ideas on selfhood as formulated in The Second Sex and other philosophical essays of the 1940s. Ursula Tidd presents a detailed analysis of Beauvoir's engagement with ...

This is the first full-length study to explore Simone de Beauvoir's autobiographical and biographical writings in the context of her ideas on selfhood as formulated in The Second Sex and other philosophical essays of the 1940s. Ursula Tidd presents a detailed analysis of Beauvoir's engagement with issues of gender, sexuality and race, as part of her auto/biographical strategy in seeking to write herself into the male-constructed autobiographical canon. Tidd offers new readings of Beauvoir's unpublished diaries and recently published letters along with more well-known philosophical and autobiographical texts.

In this fresh approach to Wendell Berry's entire literary canon, Janet Goodrich argues that Berry writes primarily as an autobiographer and as such belongs to the tradition of autobiography. Goodrich maintains that whether Berry is writing poetry, fiction, or prose, he is imagining and re-imagining ...

In this fresh approach to Wendell Berry's entire literary canon, Janet Goodrich argues that Berry writes primarily as an autobiographer and as such belongs to the tradition of autobiography. Goodrich maintains that whether Berry is writing poetry, fiction, or prose, he is imagining and re-imagining his own life from multiple perspectives -- temporal as well as imaginative.

With these ongoing re-creations of his own life through the different vocations that comprise his being, Berry imaginatively shapes his experience into literary artifice. Goodrich identifies five of these vocations -- the autobiographer, the poet, the farmer, the prophet, and the neighbor -- and traces them in the body of Berry's work where they are consistently identifiable in the authorial voice and obvious to the imagination in fictive characterizations. Berry's writings express these "personae" as they develop, partly by intent and partly by chance, and it is this complexity of perspective the enables Berry to write and rewrite his experience in ways that allow him to connect with his readers.

Goodrich's book is organized thematically into five chapters, each examining one of Berry's imaginative voices. Within each chapter, she has proceeded chronologically through Berry's work in order to trace the development in each point of view. Thus, the study opens the possibility of understanding Berry's writings without reducing him. By acknowledging the relationships between different themes and patterns of language in the texts, Goodrich helps the reader appreciate the richness with which Berry writes his life into art.

Whereas others have categorized Berry according to just one of his many facets, The UnforeseenSelf in the Works of Wendell Berry takes account of his work in all its complexity, providing a coherent critical context and method of study. Reconciling the sometimes-contradictory labels pinned on Berry, this vital study

While biographers have widely acknowledged the importance of family relationships to the Brontes' writing processes, literary critics have yet to give extensive consideration to the family as a subject of the writing itself. In "We Are Three Sisters, " Drew Lamonica focuses on the role of families ...

While biographers have widely acknowledged the importance of family relationships to the Brontes' writing processes, literary critics have yet to give extensive consideration to the family as a subject of the writing itself. In "We Are Three Sisters, " Drew Lamonica focuses on the role of families in the Brontes' fiction of personal development, exploring the ways in which it recognizes the family as a defining community for selfhood.

Drawing on extensive primary sources, including works by Sarah Ellis, Sarah Lewis, Ann Richelieu Lamb, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, Lamonica examines the dialogic relationship between the Brontes' novels and a mid-Victorian domestic ideology disseminated in conduct books and home guides that held the family to be the original nurturer of subjectivity. Using a sociohistorical framework, "We Are Three Sisters" shows that the Brontes' novels display a heightened awareness of the complexities of contemporary female experience and the,problems of securing a valued sense of selfhood not wholly dependent on family ties.

Chapter one discusses the mid-Victorian "culture of the family, " in which the Brontes emerged as voices exploring the adequacy of the family as the site for personal, and particularly female, development. Chapter two provides an introduction to the Brontes' early collaborative writings, in order to understand the sisters' shared interest in the family's formative role in the context of their own experience as a family of authors. It also shows the influences of Patrick and Branwell Bronte on the development of their sisters' writing.

Chapters three through seven explore the various constructionsof family in the sisters' novels. Of the numerous studies on the Brontes, comparatively few consider all seven novels together, and no previous study has undertaken to examine the Brontes' writing in the context of mid-Vict