Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing

Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing: Picturing the Female Self
2021 Palgrave (Life writing series)
editors :
Valérie Baisnée
Corinne Bigot
Stephanie Genty
Nicoleta ALexoae-Zagni
Claire Bazin

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.

CONTENTS

1 Introduction
Valérie Baisnée-Keay

Part I Imagining Identity
2 Thinking through the Book and Reimagining the Page: Julie Chen’s Artists’ Books and Faith Ringgold’s Story Quilts
Hertha D. Sweet Wong

3 ‘[Un]systematic, even with the image’: Text-image Blurring, Self-Inquiry and Ontological Anxiety in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s works
Marie-Agnès Gay

4 A Visual-Verbal-Virtual Redefinition of Womanhood by Janet Mock
Aurelia Mouzet

5 Authoritatively Her/Self: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Life Writing
Edyta Frelik

Part II Reframing Memories

6 Fun Homes and Queer Houses of Memory in Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Memoirs
Heloïse Thomas

7 Framing Herself Then and Now: Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Self-Writing and the Evolving Practice of Photo Albums
Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni

8 Nostalgic Albums or Alternative Lieux de mémoire? The Interplay between Stories, Photographs, and Recipes in Ethnic Culinary Memoirs
Corinne Bigot

Part III Elusive Textual/Visual Referentiality

9 Zelda Fitzgerald’s Self-Portraiture: A Strenuous Performance from Ink to Gouache
Elisabeth Bouzonviller

10 Isabella Bird-Bishop’s 1897 Journey up the Yangtze Valley and Beyond: Beyond the Writing/ Photographing Divide
Floriane Reviron-Piégay

11 A Woman’s Life of War Pictures: Elizabeth Butler (1846-1933)
Nathalie Saudo-Welby

12 Whistler’s (Mother’s) Daughter: Image-Text Relations in Marilyn French’s Fictionalized (Auto)biography
Stephanie Genty

Part IV Visual/Textual Embodiment

13 ‘It Is Difficult to Find the Words’: The Image-Text Interface in Lynn Kohlman’s Cancer Auto/biography
Marta Fernández-Morales

14 Creating Together an ‘Unexpected Home’: Navigating the Matrixial Borderspace through Text and Image in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–79)
Justyna Wierzchowska

General Bibliography

Index