Harding, K (2019) "Never to be yourself and yet always": taking the feminist personal essay from clickbait to craft. PhD thesis, Bath Spa University.
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Abstract
Through practice-based research, I sought to determine what for me has become an urgent question about the craft of a personal essay. What, I ask, distinguishes the tradition of Montaigne from essays that, as Bennett (2015) puts it, “make a show of maximal divulgence, but are too half-baked and dashed-off to do the work of real introspection”? In ten personal essays, I explore themes of personhood and dehumanization through the lens of living in a particular body (fat, female, infertile, over-forty) in a particular time and place (Trump’s America). In the contextualizing exegesis that accompanies my essay collection, I ask where the crucial distinctions between “clickbait” and craft lie, frequently examining my own practice and development in ways that I hope will be useful to other writers.
| Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) |
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| Note: | The document attached to this record is the contextualizing research section of the thesis only. It does not include the creative component. This thesis was supervised by Professor Tracy Brain and Professor Gerard Woodward. Reference included in abstract: Bennett, L. (2015) ‘The first-person industrial complex’. Slate, 14 September. |
| Divisions: | School of Writing, Publishing and the Humanities |
| Identification Number: | https://doi.org/10.17870/bathspa.00013400 |
| Date Deposited: | 24 Aug 2020 13:54 |
| Last Modified: | 21 Apr 2023 13:35 |
| URI / Page ID: | https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/13400 |
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