“All This Was My Life”: Constructing Textual Self-Identity in Diaries

<p>The ordering and control of experience through fictive selves, constructed in consideration of an audience of the self and others, is part of the diary’s identity-building and meaning-making function. This thesis analyzes the process by which the diaries of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Janet Schaw construct multiple textual identities and conceptualize their public and private selves. The projection of these multiple selves in the diary text serve to justify the private individual experience as extraordinary and worth telling, as well as to connect with a public community experience, relating the self to a greater socio-cultural context.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Year

2012

Author dc:creator

• Jeansonne, Christie M

Contributors dc:contributor

• Doll, Daniel and Piano, Doreen
• White, Leslie

• journal
• identity-making
• travel narrative
• trauma
• testimony
• mental illness
• English Language and Literature

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1445

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarworks.uno.edu:td-2438