Published in 2017
248 pages
Malin Lidström Brock is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. She received her D.Phil. in English Literature from Oxford University, UK. Her primary research areas are contemporary American literature and culture, with a particular focus on life writing and gender. She has also given courses for doctoral students in academic writing and research methods in literature. She has previously taught at Dalarna University College. Her primary research interests are theories of life writing with a particular focus on gender; contemporary American literature and culture; film; Modernism, especially Virginia Woolf; transculturalism; and migration literature.
Education:
D.Phil. in English Literature (2010) from Oxford University, United Kingdom; M.St. in Research Studies in English Literature (2002), Oxford University; M.A. in Comparative Literature (Litteraturvetenskap) (2000), Göteborg University; B.A. in Comparative Literature (1994), Göteborg University; Journalism (1997), JMG, Göteborg University.
What is this book about?
This book draws attention to the controversy that surrounds Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, and Simone de Beauvoir’s lives and the important role that their life stories have played in their feminist writing. Directly and indirectly, the four women have contributed to battles over feminism’s meaning through autobiographically informed political writing. Inevitably, therefore, their biographers are also participants in these battles, yet not always on the same side as their subjects. Writing Feminist Lives introduces a further fold of nuance into considerations of biography and feminism by showing that the biographers of the four women have made methodological choices that reflect their loyalty to, or their skepticism towards, competing ideological definitions of the exemplary feminist life.
