This book examines the relationship between words and images in various life-writing works produced by nineteenth to twenty-first century American and British women. It addresses the politics of images in women's life writing, contending that the presence or absence of images is often strategic. Including a range of different forms of life writing, chapters draw on traditional (auto)biographies, travel narratives, memoirs, diaries, autofiction, cancer narratives, graphic memoirs, artistic installations, quilts and online performances, as life writing moves from page to screen and other media. The book explores a wide range of women who have crossed the boundary between text and image: painters who have become writers, novelists who have become painters, writers who hesitate between images and words, models who seize the camera, and artists who use the frame as a page.
"Through lifewriting texts in various media and modalities, the contributors to Text and Image in Women's Life Writing: Picturing the Female Self engage with text, images, and gender, to reclaim "images of women and by women." The ways that authors and artists deploy images and text may complement, resist, or contradict the other, which enriches the life narrative analysis at the center of the work." (Amy Carlson, Biography, Vol. 46 (2), 2023)
"Text and Image in Women's Life Writing is an impressive collection that admirably achieves its purpose 'to contribute to the ongoing conversation on text, image, and gender' ... . It will be of special interest to H-Biography network members and others ... . For those of us involved in the practice of women's biography, this volume grapples with and provides insights about four highly pertinent areas, namely, identity, memory, referentiality and embodiment." (Josephine May, H-Net Reviews, h-net.org, April, 2022)
"Text and Image in Women's Life Writing is an impressive collection that admirably achieves its purpose 'to contribute to the ongoing conversation on text, image, and gender' ... . It will be of special interest to H-Biography network members and others ... . For those of us involved in the practice of women's biography, this volume grapples with and provides insights about four highly pertinent areas, namely, identity, memory, referentiality and embodiment." (Josephine May, H-Net Reviews, h-net.org, April, 2022)