Sidonie Smith

Twentieth-Century Women's Travel Writing

Moving Lives

Julia Watson

De/Colonizing the Subject surveys women's autobiographical practices as they have arisen within and confronted the contexts of colonization and oppression. Challenging a universalism that reduces whole cultures to contained stereotypes and persons to cult.

The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography

De/colonizing the Subject

Women's Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century

Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body

Sidonie A. Smith

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 wrote to support themselves and their families; some transgressed social norms in search of new possibilities. Each woman’s story is strikingly individual, yet the brief narratives in this anthology collectively chart bold new visions of women’s agency.

American Women's Autobiographical Writing, 1819–1919

Before They Could Vote

Charts the ways that woman artists have represented themselves and their life stories

Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance

Interfaces

Kay Schaffer

Exploring the cultural politics of the Olympic Games, these essays investigate such topics as the emergence of women athletes as cultural commodities, the orchestrated spectacles of the opening and closing ceremonies, and the Gay Games. Unforgettable events and decisions are also discussed.

Power, Politics, and the Games

The Olympics at the Millennium

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 David-Neel journeying on foot across the Himalayas; Robyn Davidson on her camel in the outback of Australia; Amelia Earhart, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and Beryl Markham climbing into the cockpit of their airplanes; Mary Morris riding a train from Beijing to Berlin; Irma Kurtz taking a Greyhound into the bellies of American cities and towns -- of these and other women, Smith asks: What do they make of their travels? How do they enact the dynamics of and contradictions in the drift of identity? Are they defined by the experience -- or do they define the meaning of a particular mode of transport in new and different ways, and in doing so, disentangle travel from its masculine logic? Unique in its focus on the relationship of women in motion, technologies of motion, and autobiographical practices, Moving Lives will interest readers across a broad spectrum of disciplines, as well as those who are simply intrigued by travel narratives.

Twentieth-century Women's Travel Writing

Gisela Brinker-Gabler

Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe

Writing New Identities

Life Writing in the Long Run gathers twenty-one essays by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson written in collaboration or solo and published over the last quarter-century. It includes the introductions to their five edited collections; essays focused on such autobiographical genres as autoethnography, Bildungsroman, diary, digital life writing, genealogy, graphic memoir, human rights witnessing, manifesto; and essays engaging the key concepts of authenticity, performativity, postcoloniality, relationality, and visuality. Available in print, eBook, and open access versions, this collection captures decades of exciting developments in the field, making it indispensable reading for courses on modes and media of self-presentation in cultural, gender, and literary studies and feminist theory.

A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader

Life Writing in the Long Run

projects, and an extensive bibliography. --Book Jacket.

A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives

Reading Autobiography

The first comprehensive guide to the burgeoning field of women's autobiography. Essays from 39 prominent critics and writers explore narratives across the centuries and from around the globe. A list of more than 200 women's autobiographies and a comprehensive bibliography provide invaluable information for scholars, teachers, and readers.

Sidonie Smith

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