My Life as I Remember It: Subjectivities, feeling, and narrative in working-class women’s self-representation from late-twentieth-century England

This thesis is an historical and literary study of working-class women’s lifewriting from texts written in England during the 1970s and 1980s. The main objectives are to recover these author’s subjectivities and emotional worlds, situating them in their historic and cultural contexts, and to understand the ways in which they negotiated the intersections of their identities. Moreover, it considers how different historical experiences including class, gender, and race shape literary form and examine what it meant for these women to write in such a way about their lives. These aims are achieved in two ways. The first chapter of analysis features a comparative methodology of texts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with works from the late twentieth century to historicise dominant structures of feeling and examine how working-class women responded to patterns of social change. The following chapters each focus on a single author writing in the 1970s and 1980s, examining the works of Adeline Hodges, Kathleen Betterton, Pauline Wiltshire, Louise Shore, and Katherine Henderson. This enables a more comprehensive analysis of their use of genre, language, rhetorical devices, and the discourses they were writing within. Using the frameworks of intersubjectivity and intersectionality it considers how life stories are told in relation to different audiences and how overlapping and sometimes conflicting identities are negotiated and expressed. In doing so, this thesis contributes to understandings of working-class women’s engagement with autobiographical writing and how they constructed and reconstructed their selves through its form, emphasising working-class women’s self-representation as a reparative practice that is both dialogical and introspective and that facilitates coping with trauma and memorialising and building community.<p></p>

Author dc:creator

• Amber Stevenson (21042017)

• Lifewriting
• Autobiography
• Class
• Gender
• Race
• Disability
• Emotions

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Identifier

10779/exe.31748728.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/31748728