IN THE PRESENCE OF AUDIENCE: THE SELF IN DIARIES AND FICTION - Hardcover

MARTINSON, DEBORAH

4.6

5 ratings by Goodreads

9780814209523: IN THE PRESENCE OF AUDIENCE: THE SELF IN DIARIES AND FICTION

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0814209521 ISBN 13: 9780814209523

Publisher: Ohio State University Press, 2003

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As a diary writer imagines shadow readers rifling diary pages, she tweaks images of the self, creating multiple readings of herself, fixed and unfixed. When the readers and potential readers are husbands and publishers, the writer maneuvers carefully in a world of men who are quick to judge and to take offense. She fills the pages with reflections, anecdotes, codes, stories, biographies, and fictions. The diary acts as a site for the writer's tension, rebellion, and remaking of herself. In this book Martinson examines the diaries of Virginia Woolf Kathenne Mansfield, Violet Hunt, and Doris Lessing's fictional character Anna Wulf, and shows that these diaries (and others like them) are not entirely private writings as has been previously assumed. Rather; their authors wrote them knowing they would be read. In these four cases, the audience is the author's male lover or husband, and Martinson reveals how knowledge of this audience affects the language and content in each diary. Ultimately, she argues, this audience enforces a certain male censorship which changes the shape of the revelations, the shape of the writer herself making it impossible for the female author to be honest in writing about her true self. Even sophisticated readers often assume that diaries are primary private. This study interrogates the myth of authenticity and self-revelation in diaries written under the gaze of particular peekers.

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About the Author:

Martinson is associate professor of English writing and women's studies at Occidental College, Los Angeles.

Review:

"This solid study is likely to appeal to both an academic audience and members of the wider community with an interest in women's diaries or women's writing generally."

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