Title: Spectacular confessions
First published: 1997
Description: The only book-length critical study devoted to a diverse array of suffragist writings, Spectacular Confessions explores a neglected well of literary resources that includes prison diaries, letters, pamphlets, novels, journal essays, and feminist histories, produced by militant suffragettes in Edwardian England.

Combining literary criticism, cultural studies, and feminist theory, Barbara Green investigates the cultural function of these writings and the suffragettes' attempts to make the feminist body visible. 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. Believing that "who wins the eye wins all," these feminists built their campaign around visual representations and in the process were forced to endure beatings, prison, and forced feedings.

The writings of suffragettes such as Elizabeth Robins, Lady Constance Lytton, and Emily Wilding Davison and of feminist onlookers Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf are examined to reveal how they gave female spectacularity a variety of subversive meanings. In addition, Green links the suffrage movement with women's autobiography and feminist studies of literary modernism.
Subjects: History and criticism, Women authors, Biography, Women political activists, Autobiography, Spectacular, The, in literature, English prose literature, Suffrage in literature, Suffragists in literature, Women's rights in literature, Suffragists, Confession in literature, Women and literature, Confession, Women in literature
Places: Great Britain
LC classification: PR808.W65 G74 1997