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Mary Kingsley: the Female Ethnographic Self in Writing

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Abstract

Françoise Lionnet, in her important study of race and gender in acts of ‘self-portraiture’, asserts that the ‘problematics of authorship’ for women autobiographers turns on the splitting of the ‘subject of discourse’ into a ‘narrating self and an experiencing self which can never coincide exactly’ (Lionnet, 1989: 92). For Lionnet:

The female narrator gets caught in a duplicitous process: she exists in the text under circumstances of alienated communication because the text is the locus of her dialogue with a tradition she tacitly aims to subvert. (93)

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© 1989 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Turner, L. (1989). Mary Kingsley: the Female Ethnographic Self in Writing. In: Donnell, A., Polkey, P. (eds) Representing Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287440_4

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