Date of Award
Spring 5-2012
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.A.
Degree Program
English
Department
English
Major Professor
Doll, Daniel and Piano, Doreen
Second Advisor
White, Leslie
Abstract
The ordering and control of experience through fictive selves, constructed in consideration of an audience of the self and others, is part of the diary’s identity-building and meaning-making function. This thesis analyzes the process by which the diaries of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Janet Schaw construct multiple textual identities and conceptualize their public and private selves. The projection of these multiple selves in the diary text serve to justify the private individual experience as extraordinary and worth telling, as well as to connect with a public community experience, relating the self to a greater socio-cultural context.
Creative Commons License
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Recommended Citation
Jeansonne, Christie M., "“All This Was My Life”: Constructing Textual Self-Identity in Diaries" (2012). University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations. 1445.
https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1445
Rights
The University of New Orleans and its agents retain the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible this dissertation or thesis in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The author retains all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis or dissertation.