Migrant women use life writing not only to share pieces of their own lives, but also to write powerful narratives which confront racism, patriarchal oppression, and US imperialism. The four texts I have selected represent skillful negotiation between drastically different languages, cultures, and social systems, evinced both through the experiences the authors represent within the text and through their careful rhetorical and narrative strategies, which are tailored for particular audiences. As these narratives demonstrate, migrant women can use life writing to contest and destabilize dominant narratives of history and race. In I’ve Come a Long Way (1942), Chinese author Helena Kuo demonstrates the worth, dignity, and superiority of Chinese culture in order to convince US readers to ally with China in their fight against Japan. Kuo’s work was intended not only to garner military support for China, but also to create a more positive view of the Chinese people. Rosario Morales and Aurora Levins Morales, a mother and daughter born in New York City and Puerto Rico, respectively, write together in Getting Home Alive (1986), layering stories from the mainland United States and the island of Puerto Rico while protesting US imperialism and US military presence on the island. By enacting resistance from a variety of subject positions, the authors are able to share pieces of their life stories while also creating an alternate history of Puerto Rico, one that reveals the violence and imperial domination of the US government. In When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989), former Vietcong collaborator Le Ly Hayslip tells the story of the Vietnam War from the perspective of a Vietnamese villager, explaining why some Vietnamese resisted US forces. Through her narrative, Hayslip transforms herself from a Vietcong enemy into a reliable narrator for US readers, detailing her own suffering, empathizing with her US readership, and encouraging peace and forgiveness between nations, while still questioning the ethics of US involvement in the war. By retelling stories from her childhood on the US-Mexico border in Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (1995), Mexican author Norma Elia Cantú challenges the impermeability of borders, both between fact and fiction and between nations. By simultaneously retelling and fictionalizing her past, Cantú is able to preserve and reclaim her childhood while creating a subversive counternarrative of border life which contests dominant governmental and patriarchal narratives. All of these authors use life writing in an innovative way, tailoring their texts to the political and social context in which they were publishing and striving to build a relationship with readers at a particular time in US history. By challenging conventional, governmental, and media representations of events and contesting existing social structures, these authors provide a more comprehensive understanding of US history and society.

This thesis attempts to examine how fictionality in life writing and light writing forges a liberating space to read the self-making in Gerald Vizenor¡¦s Interior Landscape: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors. The feasibility of setting a dialogue between life writing and light writing derives from Timothy Adam¡¦s discussion in Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography. Adams demonstrates how autobiography and photography, inherently thought as referential, actually possess the indeterminate characteristic of language; hence their juxtaposition displays an intriguing effect of dissolving the artificial distinction of the two media and their interplay presents the writer¡¦s fictive impulse of making himself. Chapter One provides a survey on how life writing and light writing can be productive media to present a self-making process. The residence in language of the two media deprives the presumed referential masks they wear and the constructed ideology disguised as truth behind, primarily the illusion of the unity of the self and the identification through lineage found in photographic representation. Chapter Two explores how the verbal narrative and visual images complete each other in Vizenor¡¦s Interior Landscapes. Photography in an autobiography forms an interesting dialectics between image and text: photography serves not only as a mnemonic device but as the material base for imagination and creation to thrive in words, and the autobiographical text rewrites what has been put in the photocopy of a historical document. Chapter Three discusses the trickster discourse that Vizenor incorporates in his life writing and light writing and analyzes how the writer associates his autobiographical self with trickster figures from the tribal myth and hence creates a trickster mixedblood identity. The dialogue between Vizenor¡¦s life writing and light writing reveals the possibility that both autobiography and photography could be not only the site of memory but also that of imagination and creation in self-life-making.

My auto/ethnographical journey stems from my experience where, as an I-m-migrant, I feel like I live in the hy-phens negotiating between “a here, a there and an elsewhere” (Trinh, 2011), straddling cultures, homelands, I-dentities, and languages. This identity crisis has made me quest/ion how other i-m-migrant women, especially the Indo-Canadian women in Ottawa, navigate their hyphe-nated existence(s) with/in these liminal spaces which are both home and not-home. As both insider and outsider, I engaged in complicated conversations with Indo-Canadian women to hear about their live(d) experiences and to understand the process of my / our be/com/ing’ and be/long/ing in these hybrid spaces. The questions that guided me through this inquiry are: How do Indo-Canadian women re-produce and re-create this notion called home? What are some of influences of (im)migration on this notion of ho[me]? How do they navigate and per/form their hyphenated currere with/in these hybrid liminal spaces which are both home and not-home? What do these performances dis/close about the women’s understanding of their lives in the hyphens? Through a post-colonial, feminist perspective, and drawing from qualitative research methodologies such as “autoethnography” (Ellis, 2003), “bricolage” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2008; Kincheloe, 2001), “narrative inquiry” (Clandinin, 2013), and “found poetry” (Butler-Kisber, 2010), I perform a “literary métissage” (Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers & Leggo, 2009) of the live(d) narratives of women who, like me, are members of the Indo-Canadian diaspora. I juxtapose our conversations with artifacts, photographs, recipes, and literary pieces that depict our hyphe-nation(s). From an educational perspective, I hope that my “performance [auto]ethnography” (Alexander, 2000) of ho[me]stories of Indo-Canadian women will become a “living pedagogy” and have “the potential to become trans/formative curriculum inquiry” (Hasebe-Ludt, et al, 2009), which might help to de/construct the stereotypical image of the “universal Indian woman” (Sharma, 2009).

The submitted dissertation thesis focus on the role of biography in contemporary historical culture and on the possible ways of its conceptualization from the perspective of historiography. Historical biographies are traditional and successful form of historical writing both in academia and in popular culture. Moreover there is also a field of "theory of biography" which brings theoretical reflections of biographical writing. The goal of this thesis is to analyse the current state of biographical production and to offer appropriate conceptualization of this phenomenon. The dissertation gradually deals with following three fields. First, it describes and reflects key topics of existing theory of biography. The middle part of the text researches the contemporary biographical production. The sources for these two parts are at first theoretical texts written under the term "theory of biography" and then paratexts surrounding particular biographies. The part focus on the contemporary biographical production researches disputed biographies between the years 20009 - 2019, the regular production of biographical publishing series and particularly also the case study of the edition series The Legacy of the progressive personalities of our past (1961-1991). Both these parts pf the thesis are necessary as a...

This thesis builds upon the existing scholarship such as that by Patricia Crawford, Helen King, Alexandra Lord, and Michael Stolberg, to analyse the ways that all aspects of menstruation were accounted for in early-modern England. Broadly informed by cultural materialism, and starting with the wide-range of medical treatises that were published in the early modern period, which theorise the female body, the thesis incorporates a broad range of material from private journals, diaries, and letters to the more public conventionally literary texts such as poetry, prose fiction, and plays. The thesis is structured according to the physiological order of vaginal bleeding as understood in the early-modern period. Starting with menarche the thesis argues that just as the medical texts broadly agree that the ideal age for menarche is fourteen, so social conventions also saw this as a significant age in a girl s growth to maturity. Since fourteen was considered to be the optimum age for menarche any wide variation in this age was seen as problematic; the thesis includes analysis, therefore of early and late menarche. The thesis next examines the surviving accounts of menstruation, arguing that menstruation was something that women were disinclined to write about, preferring to manage the condition privately. The chapter offers an account of how women might have managed the practical aspects of their cycle such as sanitary protection, theorising that the negative associations of menstrual blood in the Bible influence women s position on the matter. The other significant occasions of female bleeding were hymenal and lochial bleeding and the thesis argues that these were seen as analogous to menstrual bleeding, and theorised as such. The thesis demonstrates that hymenal blood was eroticised in the period because of the importance of virginity to this society. Like all occasions of bleeding, pregnancy and lochial bleeding was seen as a dangerous event. The thesis concludes with a review of the presentation of menopause in the period.

In this dissertation I engage in life writing and literary métissage (Chambers, Hasebe-Ludt, Leggo, & Sinner, 2012; Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers, & Leggo, 2009) to explore and exemplify mindful, aesthetic, and compassionate practices for working through moments of crisis (Kumashiro, 2010) in teaching and learning. The dissertation is designed as a four-strand braid and organized around the active verb “practising” to dig deep into the dynamic, and often difficult, processes of teaching and learning: (1) Practising Vulnerability; (2) Practising Discomfort; (3) Practising Mindfulness; and (4) Practising Compassion. Each strand is composed of different genres of life writing: theoretical and analytical introductions, letter writing, journal pieces, comics, photos, poetry, creative non-fiction, collages, scenes from a play, and an alphabet book. The multimodal life writing pieces are worked examples (Gee, 2010) of contemplative practices and pedagogical praxis. Life writing offers concrete ways to practise mindfulness, reflection, and reflexivity, which, in turn, invite a more awakened, critical, and compassionate stance as an educator. If teachers want to move beyond simply promoting the importance of reflective practice, wellbeing, self-actualization, and compassion to their students then we need to show more teachers (and teacher educators) the messy process of doing so themselves. Reading life writing is a starting point for teachers at all stages in their careers to imagine how they could, or already do, engage in similar processes and invite them to cultivate compassion and self-compassion as a grounding stance for their life projects as teachers, learners, and human beings. My autoethnographic teacher inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) was prompted when I encountered “troubling” (Kumashiro, 2009) tensions when first teaching about homophobia and transphobia to teacher education students at a faculty of education on the Canadian prairies. I began to explore the vulnerability and discomfort of this teaching moment from an experimental (Davies, 2011), multimodal (Kress & Street, 2006; Pahl & Roswell, 2006), critical literacy stance (Janks, 2010; Vasquez, Tate, & Harste, 2013). My inquiry shifted after a diagnosis of breast cancer, which became an opportunity for me to awaken to more mindful, empathetic, and compassionate ways of being, living, teaching, and researching. / February 2017

Dorothea Herbert was an Irish provincial writer who did not publish during her lifetime. Only three of her manuscripts are now extant: a collection of poetry, Poetical Eccentricities Written by an Oddity (1793), an illustrated memoir, Retrospections of an Outcast (1806) and a Journal which covers the years 1806-7. All three manuscripts were missing for long periods and some doubts as to their existence and authenticity made many scholars reluctant to study her work. There is almost no documented historical evidence of her life and our only access to her is through her writing. The internal evidence of her writing suggests that by 1806 she was suffering from a serious mental illness. Nevertheless, her works reveal a relatively hidden world of literary practice in Ireland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Studied alongside the manuscripts and printed works of a range of contemporary writers, Herbert’s extant manuscripts uncover a complex and informal literary culture. This textual world is dependent on print culture but operates independently of it in a closed system of gift-giving and manuscript circulation. In this thesis I explore the influence of print culture on the writing and reading practices of Herbert and her contemporaries. The thesis is divided into five chapters which examine: the history of Herbert’s manuscripts and those of her contemporaries, their writing as material practice, the cultures in which they read the writing and circulation of manuscripts and the history of the print trade in Ireland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

In writing this thesis, I plotted where the streams of whiteness theory, life-writing theory and practice, and Daphne Marlatts novel <i>Ana Historic</i> converge. In the introduction, I outline the development of my own subjectivity, focusing on my identification with multiple ethnic communities, and on my racial and working class identity. My second chapter surveys current whiteness theories, accepting some and rejecting others, and drawing significantly upon theory that is accessible and personal, a decision that undoubtedly resulted because of my working class practicality. In this chapter, I conclude that whiteness and white solipsism (theoretically comparable to Simone de Beauvoirs challenge that masculinity as the neutral and positive gender renders femininity and other gendered constructions negative), actually envelope multiple identities, but argue that the way in which whiteness is experienced by those on its margins is often monolithic. In the third chapter, I investigate Marlatts biography and her life writing theory, arguing that her experience as a once immigrant foregrounds many issues relevant to the Canadian white identity, and that because her theory is so conscious of how identity is constructed, relying on fact and fiction, <i>Ana Historic</i> provides a portrait of white Canadian identity and the context in which that identity has been constructed. In Chapters 4 and 5, I apply the theories of life writing and whiteness to the characters of Ana, Ina, and Annie, challenging that their identities as colonizer, emigrant, and immigrant, respectively, illustrate the evolution resulting in the current white Canadian identity. Further, because Marlatt chooses these characters who occupy different positions in history, she shows her reader that contemporary Canadian white identity has grown out of colonial times, creating a continuum. The history out of which each of these women emerges is never contained because aspects of their identity carry forward into subsequent generations.

Olaudah Equiano or Gustavas Vassa may have had abolitionist motivations when writing The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavas Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, but the function of the text is much different and self-serving. Specifically, in looking closely at the wording of the text, with its language of we versus they, in group versus out group, ours versus theirs, Equiano clearly feels he at no time belongs fully to any specific group or place; rather, he only partially belongs anywhere, and thus, creates this work of autobiography and appropriation of fiction and oral tradition to negotiate and cultivate his own liminal, or even heterotopic, space. In other words, I suggest he may have used the writing of this text to define his sense of self, creating a space in which he was both in control and fully belonged.

This study analyzes the techniques that Canadian comics life writers develop to construct personal histories. I examine a broad selection of texts including graphic autobiography, biography, memoir, and diary in order to argue that writers and readers can, through these graphic narratives, engage with an eclectic and eccentric understanding of Canadian historical subjects. Contemporary Canadian comics are important for Canadian literature and life writing because they acknowledge the importance of contemporary urban and marginal subcultures and function as representations of people who occasionally experience economic scarcity. I focus on stories of “ordinary” people because their stories have often been excluded from accounts of Canadian public life and cultural history. Following the example of Barbara Godard, Heather Murray, and Roxanne Rimstead, I re-evaluate Canadian literatures by considering the importance of marginal literary products. Canadian comics authors rarely construct narratives about representative figures standing in place of and speaking for a broad community; instead, they create what Murray calls “history with a human face . . . the face of the daily, the ordinary” (“Literary History as Microhistory” 411). My research finds that contemporary Canadian graphic narratives create mundane personal histories using a medium that is inherently attuned to exaggeration and fragmentation. My reading of graphic narrative is based on “autographics,” a recent field of scholarship that analyzes the interactions between visual and verbal forms of communication in works of life writing. I draw on visual rhetorical studies and communication design in order to describe “the distinctive technology and aesthetics of life narrative that emerges in comics” (Whitlock 965). The medium of comics playfully manipulates the discourses of documentary evidence and testimonial authority. At the same time, it gives Canadian authors tools for depicting the experiences of ordinary individuals through a rich collection of emotional, sensorial, and perceptual information. Focusing on the work of such authors as Chester Brown, David Collier, Julie Doucet, Sarah Leavitt, and Seth, I suggest that Canadian comics authors exploit the unique formal properties of the medium of comics in order to interrogate dominant nationalist discourses. They also develop an alternative method for analyzing narratives about the past.