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Treating poverty not simply as a theme in literature but as a force that in fact shapes the texts themselves, Rimstead adopts the notion of a common culture to include ordinary voices in national culture, in this case the national culture of Canada.

This exploration of women's autobiographical writings in the Americas focuses on three specific genres: testimonio, metafiction, and the family saga as the story of a nation. What makes Laura J. Beard's work distinctive is her pairing of readings of life narratives by women from different countries and traditions. Her section on metafiction focuses on works by Helena Parente Cunha, of Brazil, and Luisa Futoranksy, of Argentina; the family sagas explored are by Ana María Shua and Nélida Piñon, of Argentina and Brazil, respectively; and the section on testimonio highlights narratives by Lee Maracle and Shirley Sterling, from different Indigenous nations in British Columbia. In these texts Beard terms \"genres of resistance,\" women resist the cultural definitions imposed upon them in an effort to speak and name their own experiences. The author situates her work in the context of not only other feminist studies of women's autobiographies but also the continuing study of inter-American literature that is demanding more comparative and cross-cultural approaches. Acts of Narrative Resistanceaddresses prominent issues in the fields of autobiography, comparative literature, and women's studies, and in inter-American, Latin American, and Native American studies.

WINNER - Prix du livre d’Ottawa 2016 WINNER - Prix Jean-Éthier-Blais 2015 WINNER - Prix Gabrielle-Roy 2014 FINALIST - Prix littéraire Trillium 2015 From the founding of New France to the present day, Quebec women have had to negotiate societal expectations placed on their gender. Tracing the evolution of life writing by Quebec women, Patricia Smart presents a feminist analysis of women’s struggles for autonomy and agency in a society that has continually emphasized the traditional roles of wife and mother. Writing Herself into Being examines published autobiographies and autobiographical fiction, as well as the annals of religious communities, letters, and a number of published and unpublished diaries by girls and women, to reveal a greater range of women’s experiences than proscribed, generalized roles. Through close readings of these texts Smart uncovers the authors’ perspectives on events such as the 1837 Rebellion, the Montreal cholera epidemic of 1848, convent school education, the struggle for women’s rights in the early twentieth century, and the Quiet Revolution. Drawing attention to the individuality of each writer while situating her within the social and ideological context of her era, this book further explores the ways women and girls reacted to, and often rebelled against, the constraints imposed on them by both Church and state. Written in a clear and compelling narrative style that brings women’s voices to life, Writing Herself into Being – the author’s own translation of her award-winning French-language book De Marie de l’Incarnation à Nelly Arcan: Se dire, se faire par l’écriture intime (Boréal, 2014) – offers a new and gendered view of various periods in Quebec history.WINNER - Prix du livre d’Ottawa 2016 WINNER - Prix Jean-Éthier-Blais 2015 WINNER - Prix Gabrielle-Roy 2014 FINALIST - Prix littéraire Trillium 2015 From the founding of New France to the present day, Quebec women have had to negotiate societal expectations placed on their gender. Tracing the evolution of life writing by Quebec women, Patricia Smart presents a feminist analysis of women’s struggles for autonomy and agency in a society that has continually emphasized the traditional roles of wife and mother. Writing Herself into Being examines published autobiographies and autobiographical fiction, as well as the annals of religious communities, letters, and a number of published and unpublished diaries by girls and women, to reveal a greater range of women’s experiences than proscribed, generalized roles. Through close readings of these texts Smart uncovers the authors’ perspectives on events such as the 1837 Rebellion, the Montreal cholera epidemic of 1848, convent school education, the struggle for women’s rights in the early twentieth century, and the Quiet Revolution. Drawing attention to the individuality of each writer while situating her within the social and ideological context of her era, this book further explores the ways women and girls reacted to, and often rebelled against, the constraints imposed on them by both Church and state. Written in a clear and compelling narrative style that brings women’s voices to life, Writing Herself into Being – the author’s own translation of her award-winning French-language book De Marie de l’Incarnation à Nelly Arcan: Se dire, se faire par l’écriture intime (Boréal, 2014) – offers a new and gendered view of various periods in Quebec history.

Drawing from the insights of subaltern studies and postcolonial feminisms, Proma Tagore brings together the work of a diverse group of writers - Toni Morrison, Shani Mootoo, Louise Erdrich, M.K. Indira, Rashsundari Debi, and Mahasweta Devi. She focuses on the visceral, affective nature of their narratives and explores the way that personal and historical trauma, initially silenced, may be recorded across generations, as well as across complex national, racial, gender, and sexual lines.

Drawing on postcolonial, feminist, poststructuralist, and First Nations theory, Hoy raises and addresses questions around ?difference? in relation to texts by contemporary Native women prose writers in Canada.

A study of American women’s narratives of mobility and travel, this book examines how geographic movement opened up other movements or mobilities for antebellum women at a time of great national expansion. Concerned with issues of personal and national identity, the study demonstrates how women not only went out on the open road, but participated in public discussions of nationhood in the texts they wrote. Roberson examines a variety of narratives and subjects, including not only traditional travel narratives of voyages to the West or to foreign locales, but also the ways travel and movement figured in autobiography, spiritual, and political narratives, and domestic novels by women as they constructed their own politics of mobility. These narratives by such women as Margaret Fuller, Susan Warner, and Harriet Beecher Stowe destabilize the male-dominated stories of American travel and nation-building as women claimed the public road as a domain in which they belonged, bringing with them their own ideas about mobility, self, and nation. The many women’s stories of mobility also destabilize a singular view of women’s history and broaden our outlook on geographic movement and its repercussions for other movements. Looking at texts not usually labeled travel writing, like the domestic novel, brings to light social relations enacted on the road and the relation between story, location, and mobility. Acknowledgments Introduction: American Mobilities 1: \"What hath befallen me\": Sites of Contestation in Sarah Beavis’s Two Narratives of Her Adventures on the Mississippi River 2: \"With the Wind Rocking the Wagon\": Women’s Narratives of the Way West 3: The Politics of Mobility: Self and Nation In-(Between) Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes 4: \"A Higher Call\": Mobility, Spirituality, and Social Uplift in the Narratives of Maria Stewart and Jarena Lee 5: Circulations of Body and Word: Women’s Slave Narratives 6: Domesticating the Road in the Wide World of Antebellum Women’s Novels 7: Touristic Writing by Antebellum Women Sightseers 8: Jane Cazneau and Margaret Fuller: The Politics of Mobility—Manifest Destiny and Revolution Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index Susan Roberson is Professor of English at Texas A & M University--Kingsville. She is the author of Emerson in His Sermons: A Man-Made Self (1995) and the editor of Women, America, and Movement: Narratives of Relocation (1998) and of Defining Travel: Diverse Visions (2001).

Postcolonial novels that tend to become popularly acclaimed in Western Europe and North America share a number of features: they are predominantly written by women; they are presented from the perspectives of culturally innocent or marginal protagonists; they thematize the emotional consequences of familial or public upheavals; and they are not too long but, if they are, they compensate by being thematically, formally, or linguistically unadventurous. This is the primary context of reception of much contemporary African writing, and it is not surprising that new works of fiction by African writers feed into this typology. The novel remains about the most inclusive of literary forms, but a certain kind of novel has become so dominant today as to be viewed as the gold standard, especially when this is measured by popular or critical success. This paper discusses these features in relation to three issues: the structure of the prose form, especially the novel; the external factors of economics and symbolic capital; and the politics of postcolonial stories. The paper argues that the process of cultural politics through which symbolic capital is reproduced in postcolonial stories is a function of what writers perceive to be the market of their works. By reading against the grain of Allah Is Not Obliged (Ahmadou Kourouma) and Purple Hibiscus (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie), the paper suggests that contemporary African writing remains fraught with a paradox, the productive foreignness of a sensibility that is estranged from its own interests.

Femininity in colonial societies is a particularly contested element of the sex/gender system; while it draws on a conservative belief in universal and continuous values, it is undermined by the liberal rhetoric of freedom characteristic of the New World. Practising Femininity analyses the ways in which Canadian texts by Catharine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie, Nellie McClung, Sinclair Ross, and others work to produce and naturalize femininity in a colonial setting. Drawing on Judith Butler?s definition of gender as performance, Misao Dean shows how practices which seem to transgress the feminine ideal ? the difficulties of emigration, physical labour, autobiographical writing, work for wages, sexual desire, and suffrage activism ? were justified by Canadian writers as legitimate expressions of an unvarying feminine inner self. Early Canadian writers cited a feminine gender ideal which emphasized love of home and adherence to duty; New Women and Suffrage writers attributed sexuality to a biological desire to reproduce; in the work of Sinclair Ross, the feminine ideal was moulded by prevailing Freudian models of femininity. This study is grounded in the most important current gender theories, and will interest Canadian literary scholars, feminist historians and theoreticians, and students of women?s studies.

Gabonese author Justine Mintsa may write in French, but her approach to decolonizing the literary text includes the skillful and artistic infusion of elements of her native Fang culture and language. In her three works to date, Un seul tournant Makosu (1994), Premieres lectures (1997), and Histoire d'Awu (2000), Mintsa's prose mixes with poetry clearly inspired by the m'vet, the renowned epic of the Fang. In Histoire d'Awu, Mintsa challenges certain oppressive traditions, such as the treatment of Fang widows by their sister-in-laws. Yet, Mintsa rewrites in the same text a contemporary version of a Fang creation myth that serves to pay homage to the rich history of her culture. In all of her texts, Mintsa succeeds in praising what is positive about Fang tradition while questioning other customs. While Western feminist theory often equates \"tradition\" with \"oppression,\" Mintsa defies this notion in her Afrocentric approach to writing in French.