Insurgencies: Women's autobiography and literary politics in British modernism, 1889--1938 (Constance, Lady Lytton, Virginia Woolf)

Insurgencies analyzes connections between autobiography as an aesthetic practice, the formation of the modern female subject, and political dissidence in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Great Britain. It is a response to my interest in the following question: does the theoretical work of Michel Foucault permit activist autobiographical practice and, if so, how might this practice be employed to read the political autobiography of modern women? As it works to answer question, Insurgencies intervenes in the study of British modernism, autobiography, and women's studies in three ways: First, it proposes a theoretical redefinition of women's autobiography as a genre of feminist practical critique that not only investigates the historical limits of subjectivity and power, but also stresses the transgression of these limits through the use of specific narrative strategies. Second, by bringing together the autobiographical texts of well-known and marginalized women, it investigates the emergence of new forms of female political subjectivity in modernity. Third, it contests the persisting gap between experimental and realist modes of writing in modernist aesthetics.; This dissertation examines Lady Constance Lytton's political autobiography, Prisons and Prisoners (1914), life-writing collected in the British Women Co-operative Guild's Maternity (1915) and Life as We Have Known It (1931), and Virginia Woolf's polemical letter/essay Three Guineas (1938). As it examines disciplinary mechanisms at work in the domestic spaces of privileged women, the economic spaces of working-class women, and the aesthetic spaces of modern women writers, this project argues that Lytton, members of the Women's Co-operative Guild, and Woolf provide nuanced and compelling diagnoses of power formations, devise strategies for political change, and invent new forms of autobiographical writing.