Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. CONTENTS v
3. Acknowledgments vii
4. Introduction 1
5. PART I MUSE-INGS ON GENRE, AUTOBIOGRAPHY, NARRATIVE: FORMATIVE STRATEGIES
6. Border Crossing as Method and Motif in Contemporary American Writing, or, How Freud Helped Me Case the Joint 11
7. Me and My Shadow 23
8. Beyond Literary Darwinism: Women's Voices and Critical Discourse 41
9. "Everyday Use": My Sojourn at Parchman Farm 67
10. Excerpts from Letters to Friends 75
11. Social Circles: Being a Report on J. Hillis Miller's Campus Visitation 81
12. Touchstones and Bedrocks: Learning the Stories We Need 93
13. PART II CRITICAL CONFESSIONS
14. Creative Voices: Women Reading and Women's Writing 101
15. Breaking Silence: The Woman Warrior 117
16. Different Silences 127
17. "What's in a Name?": Some Meanings of Blackness 135
18. Poetry and the Age: "A Girl in a Library" to Randall Jarrell 151
19. My Friend, Joyce Carol Oates 163
20. Somebody Must Say These Things: An Essay for My Mother 175
21. The Scarlet Brewer and the Voice of the Colonized 191
22. Dividing Fences 197
23. What Do Women Really Mean? Thoughts on Women's Diaries and Lives 207
24. PART III AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL LITERARY CRITICISM
25. Between the Medusa and the Abyss: Reading Jane Eyre, Reading Myself 223
26. Rereading Middlemarch, Rereading Myself 237
27. The Crippling of the Third World: Shiva Naipaul's Heritage 245
28. Penelope's Web 255
29. "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around": Reading the Narrative of Frederick Douglass 265
30. Catharine Trotter Cockburn and Me: A Duography 273
31. In Between Abject & Object: The Mourning Sickness of the Expectant Mother, or, Three Movements of the Blues in B Minor 283
32. La Ronde of Children and Mothers 293
33. Selected Bibliography 303
34. Contributors 309