Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies - Volume 19, Issue 3, 2016

Abstract Unpublished and undistributed, Truus van Bruinessen’s collection of life-writings in Dutch (journal, letters, and travel writing) and English (memoir) only exists in a box in Canada’s National Archives. It documents its author’s migration to Canada and her domestic travails as a housewife of the 1950s, which include her lack of access to English. The archive provides a unique opportunity for the study of gender and languag Read More

Abstract Within the last decade, several studies have analysed the life-writing produced by veterans of the U.S. American war against – and the ensuing occupation of – Iraq (2003-2011). These studies are beginning to offer insightful analyses of several autobiographies written by Iraq War veterans; they focus almost exclusively on male combat veterans, perpetuating a bias that has shaped the genre of autobiographies of Read More

Abstract Following Carl Pletsch’s hypothesis of ‘The life lived in anticipation of one’s biographers’, we explore the ‘autobiographical lives’ of two couples of creative individuals who have and will become the subjects of biographies: these couples are the canonised and popular Austrian writers Friederike Mayröcker (b. 1925) and Ernst Jandl (b. 1925, d. 2000) and the relatively unknown exiles Salka Viertel (b. 1889, d. 1978) and B Read More

Abstract Life-writing documents are not difficult to find; they are part of any archive’s inventory. Nonetheless, a number of European countries have recently witnessed the rise of a new, genre-based type of archive: the diary archive. The Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (1984) in Italy was the first of this kind, and more were to follow, such as the Association pour l’autobiographie et le patrimoine autobiographique in France (APA, 1992 Read More