商品簡介
Five months before her death of tuberculosis in 1884, Marie Bashkirtseff, an aspiring artist and a would-be mondaine, composed a preface to her personal diary. In it, she brazenly declared that in the event of her early death her diary was to be published. Three years later, a truncated version of the diary appeared. Translated into English, championed by Barres and Gladstone, taken up by young diarists from France to the US, the diary created a major sensation, remaining standard reading for young women in both the anglophone and francophone worlds until the 1930s.
The first full-length study to explore the questions that reading Bashkirtseffs journal raises with respect to both genre and gender construction. Personal Effects examines the genre and gender issues at stake in Bashkirtseffs bid to go public with the personal, and explores the discursive strategies by which Bashkirtseff writes her journal from the private context of its keeping to a public context of reading. Wilson reads the diary as a performance of writing, one in which a display of the personal mediates between the subjective and the social, the private and the public.
Research Monographs in French Studies form a separate series within the Legenda programme and are selected and edited by the Society for French Studies. The series seeks to publish the best new work in all areas of the literature, thought, theory, culture, film and language of the French-speaking world.
作者簡介
Sonia Wilson is Lecturer in French at the University of Sydney
