Publisher's Synopsis
Bringing together the fields of literary criticism, cultural studies and women's studies, this text is devoted to a wide variety of suffragist writings. The author draws on a collection of prison diaries, letters, pamphlets, novels, journal essays and feminist histories in order to investigate the cultural function of writings produced by militant suffragettes in Edwardian England. Green describes these writings as examples of a modernist autobiographical gesture - the "Spectacular Confession" - that crosses generic borders to blend the documentary with the performative, offering dramatic displays of self-representation. The writings of suffragettes like Elizabeth Robins, Lady Constance Lytton, and Emily Wilding Davison, and of feminist onlookers like Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf are examined to reveal how they gave female spectacularity a variety of subversive meanings. In addition, Green explores the complex connections between the writings of suffragettes and the dominant discourses of modernity.
