When Memory Speaks - Hardcover

Conway, Jill K.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679445935 ISBN 13: 9780679445937

Publisher: Random House USA Inc, 1998

Synopsis

Focusing on writers over the centuries, from Benjamin Franklin to Virginia Woolf to Frank McCourt, the author explores the continuing popularity of autobiographies and accounts for the differences in form and style in men's and women's narratives. 35,000 first printing. Tour.

About this title

About the Author

Jill Ker Conway grew up in Australia, graduated from the University of Sydney in 1958 and received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1969. From 1964 to 1975 she taught at the University of Toronto and was vice president there before serving for ten years as president of Smith College. Since 1985 she has been a visiting scholar and professor in M.I.T.'s Program in Science, Technology, and Society. In addition to her two memoirs, she has edited Written by Herself, two volumes of women's autobiographical writings.

From the Inside Flap

nway, one of our most admired  autobiographers--author of The Road from Coorain and True North--looks astutely and with feeling into the modern memoir: the forms and styles it assumes, and the strikingly different ways in which men and women respectively tend to understand and present their lives.<br>In a narrative rich with evocations of memoirists over the centuries--from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and George Sand to W. E. B. Du Bois, Virginia Woolf, Frank McCourt and Katharine Graham--the author suggests why it is that we are so drawn to the reading of autobiography, and she illuminates the cultural assumptions behind the ways in which we talk about ourselves. <br>Conway traces the narrative patterns typically found in autobiographies by men to the tale of the classical Greek hero and his epic journey of adventure. She shows how this configuration evolved, in memoirs, into the passionate romantic struggling against the conventions of society, into the frontier hero battling the wildernes

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679445935
• ISBN 13: 9780679445937
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192