Auto/Biography and Identity

This groundbreaking book shows how female performers - one of the first groups of professional women - used and still use autobiography and performance as both a means of expression and control of their private and public selves, the 'face and the mask'. In eleven essays it looks at how a range of women in the theatre - actors, managers, writers and live artists - have done this on the page and on the stage from the late eighteenth-century to the present day, from Emma Robinson to Tilly Wedekind, and from Lena Ashwell to Tracy Emin, testing the boundaries between gender, theatre and autobiographical form. The book is divided into three sections. Part I: Telling tales: autobiographic strategies; Part II: The professional/confessional self; and Part III: Auto/biography, identity and performance. The editors have selected and re-selected from 'a wealth of material those things which they believe to have both some value in themselves, and also as links which bind together past and present'. This book facilitates connections - connections between texts and performances, past and present practitioners, professional and private selves, individuals and communities, all of which have in some way renegotiated identity through autobiography and the creative act. Auto/biography and identity is a landmark in theatre history and performance analysis, in gender and cultural theory, and autobiographical studies. It will be of interest to the scholar, the student and the reader with a more general interest in the cultural history of theatre.