Personal Narratives of Romanian Women During the Cold War (1945-1989) Varieties of the Autobiographical Genre

“Her work is relevant as an international contribution, filling a gap and studying a corpus containing works that have not yet been published in English and to which the access of the researchers interested in these gender and/or literary issues is, thus, limited.”
-Dr. Slávka Tomaš?íková,
Associate Professor,
“Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice”
Faculty of Arts

“As a student of women’s literary history, I found this account of Romanian women’s personal narratives stemming from the 1940s totally absorbing and by the end richly rewarding… By recourse to the private forms of diary, notebook, memoir, women were able to observe, record , and uniquely witness the personal toll and traumas of these years.”
-Dr. Dan Dervin,
Emeritus Professor English,
Mary Washington College

“This work is academically relevant, innovative, well-organized and easy to read. The author shows a good command of academic English language and although this is a scholarly book, the writer always had a non-expert audience in mind.”
-Dr. Rubén Jarazo-Álvarez,
Senior Lecturer,
University of the Balearic Islands, Spain

“It is a contribution with a larger impact, in the context of recovering the memory of communism (a vital and general social and cultural process in post-communist Romania) and the role of women as public and social actors.”
-Dr. Petruta Teampau,
Faculty of Political, Administrative and Communication Science,
Babe?-Bolyai University

Foreword by Slávka Tomaš?íková
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The “Autobiographical Genre” and the Romanian Cold War Memoirs
Chapter One:
-“Gender and Genre”: Women’s Diaries and Memoirs
-“A Room of Her Own”: Memoirs and Gender
-Shaping Communist Female Writers, Politics, Culture and Identity Construction
-Women under Siege: Survival Stories, Gendered Chronicles
Chapter Two:
-“The Lives of Others”.
-Post- Communist Publication and Reception of Female Writers Diaries and Memoirs
-Searching for Authenticity
-Survival Stories, Memory Maps
-Understanding the Untold
Chapter Three:
-Personal Narrative Encountering History: Interpreting Events, Reconstructing (Her) stories in Annie Bentoiu’s Memoirs
-“A Cultivated Memory”
-“Unhealthy Origins”
-“Who Makes History?” History and Herstory
-“In Search of Lost Time”
Chapter Four:
-“Bourgeois Elites” and Communism: Alice Voinescu
-Prisons and Isolation: The “Reservations” of Bourgeois Elites
-“Waiting for the Judgement Day”
Chapter Five:
The Regime and its “Engaged Writers”: Nina Cassian
-The “Engaged Writers”: Privileges and Control
-“In the past I wrote on the wall/ stoutly, the party slogan”
-Multilayered Experiences: The “Diary of a Diary”
Chapter Six:
A New Generation of Communist Female Writers: The 1960s: Constanta Buzea
-Gender Ideology versus Social Practice
-Unveiling the “Top of the Iceberg”
-The Diary of a Failed Emancipation?
-Personal Narratives and Tabloidisation
Chapter Seven:
Collective Memoirs: Female Fellow Travellers: Female Experience under Communism
-The 1980s: “The Long Journey of Communism towards the End”
-Feminine Flashbacks: Adolescents, Women and Mothers in the Golden Age
Conclusions
References
Index