Published Paper


Life Writing and Asian Women Narratives

Jyoti Priyadarshini & Dr. Tanutrushna Panigrahi
India
Page: 255-262
Published on: 2023 March

Abstract

 Life writing and its contemporary forms adopted by Asian women life writers in English is diverse in nature. It is a covering term for genres of biography, autobiography, memoirs, diaries, letters, i-novel, testimony and many other forms of life writing. This paper aims to examine the new literary voices of culturally, racially and religiously distinctive Asian women writers through the various forms of life writing genres which they have adopted to record their experiences. Authors like Y?ko Tsushima (1947-2016), Hitomi Kanhera (1983-), Chanrithy Him (1965-), Loung Ung (1970-) register their voice through the form of i-novel, memoir, testimony, graphic memoir as framework. Majority of the chosen representative texts, that the paper discusses, are produced in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Here, this commodious term ‘life writing’ reflects the variance of personal narrative and how these writers adopt and negotiate with different forms of life writing to engage and invent the self. It grants women writers a scope for voluntary self-revelation and self-referentiality. As a result, they turned their back on autobiography and switched to life writing. Asian life writing encompasses various sub genres. As it progressed over time, these numerous forms of personal narrative gave freedom of speech and literary expression unveiling their silenced voices. Asian life writing brings womens’ life straight from reality to the pages and takes their narrative into the heart of others worldwide, where they somehow ultimately find a place to reside.

 

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