Mapping the Private Geography: Autobiography, Identity, and America

Gerri Reaves

Oca 2001 · McFarland

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How we write about ourselves is often a reflection of how we perceive both our own identities and our culture. This study of autobiographical writing and its reflection of personal and national identity focuses on four writers and the ways in which their work maps the internal and external self. Using the neglected autobiographical texts of Gertrude Stein, Lillian Hellman, Sam Shepard, and Joan Didion, this text analyzes the different ways in which these authors balance individual American identity with collective identities and reinvent their familial, cultural, or national engenderings. Each of these authors creates a private geography--a psychological map, a myth, an ideology, or a fiction--while at the same time exploring who can claim ownership to memory, history, and the self. This volume will prove valuable to those studying the work of any of the featured authors, as well as those seeking insight into the way an autobiography maps the self and the world.

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Gerri Reaves, lives in Fort Myers, Florida.