Publisher's Synopsis
Memoirs are not only representations of women's personal lives but also of their desire to repossess important parts of their culture, in which women's stories often seem not to have mattered. They are a tradition as old as the middle ages, and as young as today. Beginning with her own motivations for writing memoirs, Buss examines the many kinds of memoir written by contemporary women: memoirs about growing up, memoirs about traumatic events, about relationships, about work. In writing memoirs, these women publicly assert that their lives have mattered. They reshape the memoir form into a social discourse that blends the personal with the political, the self with the significant other, literature with history, and fiction with autobiography and essay. Buss urges readers to use their reading experience to help themselves imagine their own lives as being significant. Repossessing the World is the first book-length critical inquiry into women's use of form that has often been dismissed as less important than autobiography, less professional than the novel, and less intellectual than the formal essay.
