Telling Blogs
‘Telling Blogs’ ~ ‘Are we telling the truth about our lives or are we telling blogs?’
Lisa’s completed doctoral thesis – ‘Telling Blogs: An Overview of the Female’s Autoblographical Experience’ – is an exploration into the gendered relationship between life narratives, blogging, and literary autobiography, with a novel, structured as blogs, at its heart. This work explores what happens to gender and identity when we self-construct online. In tracking the history of the female autobiography from the 13th Century to the 21st century autobiographical practices online (blogging, twitter, social media), Lisa examines how the narrative processes involved in the keeping of diaries and the writing of letters, and then how their histories and theories have evolved in the medium of cyberspace, have come to create a feminised situation that best suits the contours of female self-representation.
Praise for Telling Blogs
Lisa Blower’s Telling Blogs deals with one of the most urgent topics in literary studies as the technological revolution in writing, reading and distributing literary texts hots up. She sets her scholarly analysis of the use of the blog as a process of constructing female identity in a historical trajectory of the autobiography by examining writing from across centuries. It is a work of significant interest to the growing study of the interaction between digital media and literary texts.
Telling Blogs is outstanding in its range, intelligence and scholarly ambition in maintaining a dialogue between the formal characteristics of blogging and those of earlier, different modes of writing.
This is an extremely thorough investigation into blogging as a gendered practice, making excellent use of the concept of the ‘screen stage’ analogous to the Lacanian mirror stage. The link between self-realisation and the divine revelation of conversion narratives is especially striking.
Lisa is on the verge of making a significant impact on the critical appreciation of contemporary prose with a study of blogging and its relation to earlier modes of female self-writing […] The way in which she discusses questions of genre, theory and self-discovery is appealingly lively, honest and thought-provoking; her style benefits from the creativity and openness deriving from her experience as a novelist and broadcaster. Her study of blogging raises fascinating and important questions about gender, identity, truth and cyberspace. She has read widely among relevant theorists but wears that knowledge lightly and knows how to keep her reader engaged.
Join my mailing list
