My Life as I Remember It: Subjectivities, memory and narrative in British working-class women's self-representation, 1830-1990

这项研究是英国工人阶级妇女的自传和生活写作的跨学科研究，探索这个历史上被忽视的群体如何与自传作为一种形式来构建一个阶级，种族化，性别化的“自我”。它将研究工人阶级妇女如何通过生活写作来构建和代表她们的主观自我，以及她们如何通过写作来协商种族，民族，阶级，性别身份，年龄和性别之间的交叉点。虽然在研究工人阶级妇女、自传和主体性之间的关系方面有重要的贡献，但历史编纂迄今为止几乎只关注19世纪和20世纪之交的女性写作，在档案中，女性“仍然是少数存在”，占已知文本的不到10%。伯内特档案馆保存了许多由工人阶级妇女撰写的资料，这些资料是约翰·伯内特在1973年BBC广播四台的妇女时间节目中要求工人阶级叙述的。19世纪末、20世纪初和20世纪末，工人阶级自传如雪片般涌现。本研究将以往研究的范围扩大到包括世纪中后期，并侧重于工人阶级妇女如何通过生活写作来构建和表现她们的主观自我，本研究将使用一种独创的方法来比较这两次浪潮，并研究自我概念在二十世纪的发展如何影响工人阶级妇女的主观性和她们的文献。此外，进行文学分析的工人阶级妇女的自传，这个项目将检查的语言，文化形式，和主观性，可供工人阶级妇女和他们如何来影响他们的自我代表。本研究的目的是重新定位目前的学术重点，主要使用工人阶级自传作为经验数据。当历史学家们关注工人阶级自传的文学解读时，他们经常表示担心这些自传难以解读。这项研究将提供一个更微妙的画面，工人阶级妇女如何利用体裁，修辞手段和身份模型，以框定他们的经验，在没有传统的物质和社会进步的途径。自传将采取最广泛的条款，包括个人历史的片段，日记条目，集体传记和口述历史。自传已经与“冲突解决和发展的大师叙事”联系在一起，其特点是“过度代表的西方白色男性”。工人阶级妇女的生活写作显着偏离了这一定义的体裁，并随后被视为反对它，并在批判性地调查工人阶级妇女的自传的零碎性质，这个项目将有更广泛的影响对体裁本身的理解。在重新评估阶级，性别和生活写作与种族和交叉性问题之间的关系，这个项目将提高阶级和性别身份是如何密不可分的联系，以及工人阶级妇女的身份是如何产生的主体间，流行的意识形态和文本的理解。

This research is an interdisciplinary study of British working-class women's autobiography and life writing exploring how this historically neglected group engaged with autobiography as a form to construct a classed, racialised, and gendered 'selfhood'. It will examine how working-class women constructed and represented their subjective selves through life writing and how they negotiated the intersection between race, ethnicity, class, gender identities, age, and sexuality through their writing. While there have been important contributions in the field studying the relationship between working-class women, autobiography, and subjectivity, historiography has thus far almost exclusively focused on women writing in the nineteenth and around the turn of the twentieth centuries where women "remain a minority presence" in the archive, representing less than ten percent of known texts. The Burnett Archive holds many sources written by working-class women following John Burnett's request for working-class narratives on Women's Hour on BBC Radio Four in 1973. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the late twentieth century saw flurries of working-class autobiographies produced. Expanding the scope of previous studies to include the mid to late twentieth century and focusing on how working-class women constructed and represented their subjective selves through life writing, this research will compare these two waves using an original methodology and examine how developments on the concept of selfhood over the twentieth century have impacted upon working-class women's subjectivities and their documentation. Additionally, undertaking a literary analysis of working-class women's autobiographies, this project will examine the language, cultural forms, and subjectivities that were available to working-class women and how they came to influence their self-representation. This research aims to reorient the focus of present scholarship that uses working-class autobiographies primarily as empirical data. Where historians have focused on literary readings of working-class autobiography, they have often expressed concern that they defy interpretation. This research will offer a more nuanced picture of how working-class women drew upon genre, rhetorical devices, and models of identity to frame their experiences in the absence of traditional routes of material and social progress. Autobiography will be taken in the broadest of terms, including fragments of personal histories, diaristic entries, collective biographies, and oral histories. Autobiography has come to be associated with "master narratives of conflict resolution and development" featuring "the overrepresented Western white male". Working-class women's life writing significantly diverges from this definition of the genre and has subsequently been seen in opposition to it, and in critically investigating the fragmentary nature of working-class women's autobiography this project will have broader implications on understandings of the genre itself. In reassessing the relationship between class, gender, and life writing with issues of race and intersectionality, this project will enhance understandings of how class and gender identity are inextricably linked and how working-class women's identities are produced intersubjectively, by prevailing ideologies, and textually.