Search results
Lady Anne Clifford was Countess of Pembroke, Dorset and Montgomery by marriage, and by birth Baroness Clifford. Anne began her life with the expectation that she would live the typical and prescribed life of a seventeenth-century aristocratic woman - marrying into an important family. With the death of her brother Robert in 1591, the one-year-old Anne became sole heir of the vast Clifford hereditary estates in Westmorland and north-west Yorkshire. However, her status as heir was soon compromised by her father, who began legal manoeuvres to place his own brother Francis as heir. This and George Clifford's infidelities led to great strains in his marriage to Margaret Russell, which Anne describes in detail in the 1603 Memoir. George Clifford died in 1605 and by his will left some hereditary estates to his brother Francis Clifford. The will stipulated that, should his brother leave no direct male heirs, his daughter Anne would inherit these estates. Margaret Russell refused to accept the will and this ignited an inheritance dispute that would last for decades, with repercussions that rumbled on for over a century. Anne's mother led the battle to regain her daughter's inheritance in the early years of the lawsuit. Anne Clifford lived during the reigns of four monarchs and two heads of state in her long life of eighty-six years. She experienced exile and isolation as well as great political power. Anne Clifford's surviving autobiographical writing reveals her deep commitment to maintaining a record or account of her life.
In this article I demonstrate the significance of a flexible approach to examining the autobiographical in early eighteenth-century womens writing. Using ‘old stories’, existing and developing narrative and literary forms, womens autobiographical writing can be discovered in places other than the more recognizable forms such as diaries and memoirs. Jane Barker and Delarivier Manley‘s works are important examples of the dynamic and creative use of cross-genre autobiographical writing. The integration of themselves in their fictional and poetic works demonstrates the potential of generic fluidity for innovative ways to express and explore the self in textual forms.
Writing Otherwise is a collection of essays by established feminist and cultural critics interested in experimenting with new styles of expression. Leading figures in their field, such as Marianne Hirsch, Lynne Pearce, Griselda Pollock, Carol Smart, Jackie Stacey and Janet Wolff, all risk new ways of writing about themselves and their subjects. Contributions move beyond conventional academic writing and into more exploratory registers to consider subjects such as: feminist collaborations, memories of dislocation, movement and belonging, intimacy and affect, encountering difference, passionate connections to art and opera. Some chapters use personal writing to interrogate theoretical issues; others put conceptual questions next to therapeutic ones; all of them offer the reader new ways of thinking about how and why we write, and how we might do it differently. Discovering the creative spaces in between traditional genres, many of the chapters show how new styles of writing open up new ways of doing cultural criticism. Aimed at both general and academic readers interested in how scholarly writing might be more innovative and creative, this collection introduces the personal, the poetic and the experimental into the frame of cultural criticism. This collection of essays is highly interdisciplinary and contributes to debates in sociology, history, anthropology, art history, cultural and media studies and gender studies.
This book on Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman contains eighteen new scholarly chapters on the director’s work, mainly in the cinema. Most of the contributors—some Swedish, others American or British—have written extensively on Bergman before, some for decades. Bergman is one of the most written-about artists in film history and his fame still lingers all over the world, as was seen in the celebrations of his centenary in 2018. The book was specifically conceived at that time with the aim of presenting fresh angles on his work, although several chapters also focus on traditional aspects of Bergman’s art, such as philosophy and psychology. Ingmar Bergman: An Enduring Legacy thus addresses a number of essential topics which have not featured in Bergman studies before, such as the director’s relations with Hollywood and transnational film production. It also deals at length with Bergman’s highly sophisticated use of film music and with his prominence as a writer of autobiographical literature, as well as with the intermedial relations to his films that this perspective inevitably entails. Finally, the book addresses Bergman’s complex relations to Swedish politics. Many different approaches and methods are employed in the book in order to show that Bergman remains a relevant and important artist. The analyses generally focus on some of his most memorable films, like Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Persona, and Fanny and Alexander; but some rarer material, including Hour of the Wolf, The Lie, and Autumn Sonata, is discussed as well.
Westmorland, including the castles of Brougham, Brough, Pendragon and Appleby, as well as the manor and castle of Skipton and other properties in the region of Craven, in North Yorkshire. 2 anne clifford’s autobiographical writing Anne would inherit these estates.4 He pleaded with his wife Margaret and to Anne to accept his will, writing in his last letter to her: ‘I beg of thee thou wilt take as I have meant in kindness the course I have set down for disposing of my estate’.5 Anne was to receive £15,000 upon her marriage according to the will, but only on the condition
autobiographical writing. Fifteen years her senior, Ada Reeve (1874–1966), who had also spent a substantial proportion of her career working as a Gaiety Girl and in musical comedy, titled her late autobiography Take It for a Fact (Reeve, 1954), with a similar pointed reference to her sense of agency and 18 The social and theatrical realm authority in the writing of her own professional life story. Reeve, with a characteristic lack of charm, orders us to read her reminiscences as a ‘record’ of fact, even though they were written in a moment of almost desperate nostalgia
the eighteenth century onwards. As the nineteenth century is known to be the period in which the search for a self became democratized through, among other things, the massive interest in and practice of autobiographic writing, we may ask ourselves to which extent Barbin’s text can be characterized by these features of the modern scripting and expression of the self. There have been many heated discussions about Barbin’s text as well as about Foucault’s introduction to it.17 These all assume quite facilely that an ‘anatomic truth’ was in one way or another imposed
8 Learning to love the world: the educational vision of John McGahern1 Kevin Williams Education, properly speaking, is identity constitutive, and what is striking from the point of view of philosophy of education is the manner in which John McGahern, in autobiographical writing and in interviews, articulates so eloquently how the experience of learning came to shape his sensibility and very identity. This was despite the narrow focus of the curriculum that he experienced as a pupil and taught as a teacher. During all of this period, McGahern calculated that over
autobiographical writing, the narrator and the reader are ‘engaged in a communicative action that is fundamental to autobiographical acts and the kinds of intersubjective truth they construct’36 and Smith, writing on women and autobiographical acts, suggests that particularly in the dramatic passages of her texts, where she speaks directly to the reader about the process of constructing her life story, she reveals the degree of her self-consciousness about the process of constructing her position as a woman writing in an androcentric genre. Always, then, she is absorbed in a
autobiographical writing on everyday intimate moments between me and my partner. The material that I explore consists of personal excerpts from poetic narratives, speculative storytelling and photography as visual/narrative imaginaries, motivated by my attempts to create a different way to write academically. As Deborah Bird Rose (2012) argues, ‘writing is an act of witness; it is an