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.

This collection of essays offers a stimulating insight into the practice of reading and the relationship between reading and writing in women's life writing texts such as memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, travel logs, and graphic memoirs. It covers a great variety of writers from literary classics such as Virginia Woolf to the authors of slave narratives. Some essays focus on how literary texts help frame a narrative of the self, acting as models and counter models; others insist on the role of literature in resisting imposed gendered and ethnic identities. The essays also show that female writers use reading to deepen their relationship to the rest of the world. While reading is often represented as central to life and aesthetic experience, the collection stresses that there is no single or universal approach to reading in women's life writing. Taking into account debates about life writing, the collection opens new fields of investigation and fully participates in current scholarly conversations in the field.

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.

This collection of essays offers a stimulating insight into the practice of reading and the relationship between reading and writing in women's life writing texts such as memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, travel logs, and graphic memoirs. It covers a great variety of writers from literary classics such as Virginia Woolf to the authors of slave narratives. Some essays focus on how literary texts help frame a narrative of the self, acting as models and counter models; others insist on the role of literature in resisting imposed gendered and ethnic identities. The essays also show that female writers use reading to deepen their relationship to the rest of the world. While reading is often represented as central to life and aesthetic experience, the collection stresses that there is no single or universal approach to reading in women's life writing. Taking into account debates about life writing, the collection opens new fields of investigation and fully participates in current scholarly conversations in the field.

New essays engaging with the developing field of literary geography to devote attention to the "regional" settings of Munro's stories and how they affect her characters' development or stasis. Alice Munro, the 2013 Nobel Prize laureate in Literature, has revolutionized the architecture of the short story. This collection of essays on Munro engages with literary geography, an emergent interdisciplinary field that is located at the interface between human geography and literary studies and is one of the most salient manifestations of the ongoing spatial turn in the arts and humanities. Critical readings of Munro's stories have labeled her literary production "regional," since she sets the majority of her short stories in the area of rural Ontario where she grew up. Until now, however, little attention has been devoted to the role of that location in the stories and tothe way that particular setting interacts with her characters' development or stasis. This collection contains eleven essays organized in two parts: first, Conceptualizing Space and Place: Houses, Landscapes, Territory; and second, Close Readings of Space and Place. Contributors: Corinne Bigot, Lynn Blin, Giuseppina Botta, Fausto Ciompi, Ailsa Cox, Christine Lorre-Johnston, Robert McGill, Claire Omhovere, Anca-Raluca Radu, Eleonora Rao, Caterina Ricciardi. Christine Lorre-Johnston is a senior lecturer in English at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. Eleonora Rao teaches English and American literatures at the University of Salerno.