Through Random Doors We Wandered : Women Writing the South

This book brings together a group of women interested in, even consumed by, the region they inhabit physically or mentally. They know that the South makes for good stories, but wish to complicate traditional southern narratives with stories of their own. All of them search for a language that will accurately represent their life experiences, whether at a remote plantation in antebellum Georgia or in the back wards of an Alabama institution for the criminally insane. The self-narratives in this volume propel themselves and their authors to the centre of critical debates concerning the status of the subject, the nature of self-representation, the globalisation of the regional, cultural hybridities, and the negotiations and compromises required for co-existence. Read through theoretical lenses, their texts map new representational spaces, alternative (textual) bodies, and reinventions of categories such as: region; race; and woman.