Autobiographical Inscriptions: Form, Personhood, and the American Woman Writer of Color

By engaging current approaches to the genre, Autobiographical Inscriptions breaks new ground in the field of autobiography studies. The book is centered in a discussion of the ways that innovations of form and structure contain and bolster arguments for personhood articulated by Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko, Adrienne Kennedy, and Cecile Pineda. Organized thematically, with each chapter focusing on central questions of form, this work pairs canonized texts with less well-known works, reading autobiographical works across cultural contexts, historical periods, and artistic media, and illustrating the stunning range of formal strategies available to and adopted by the American woman writer of color.