A community of one : masculine autobiography and autonomy in nineteenth-century Britain /

Drawing on recent feminist theorists of autobiography, Danahay concentrates on deconstructing 19th-century British male writers, from William Wordsworth to Matthew Arnold. The study's thesis is that female presence was effaced by self-isolating male autobiographers. Danahay draws upon M.M. Bakhtin's "dialogic" to explain "heteroglossia" and "monologism." Male post-Romantic writers are shown to be nostalgic about lost community, the cost of their "hermetic" private worlds. The study concludes with Virginia Woolf's rejection of Victorian males' dependence upon women and refusal to subscribe to their construction of individualistic gender ideology, which denigrated women by turning them into mirroring agents. Little attention is paid to older traditions of male autobiography from St. Augustine to Rousseau, which similarly silence, subvert, and deny female reality. This study relies on complex literary theory and supplements such recent studies of autobiography as The Private Self, ed. by Shari Benstock (CH, Apr'89). Excellent bibliography; useful index. Recommended for graduate studies in literary theory, 19th-century English prose, and autobiographical writing. S. A. Parker; Hiram College