Napier, Taura S.

views updated

Napier, Taura S.

PERSONAL:

Married Matthew M. DeForrest (a professor of English), May, 2000. Education: Wake Forest University, B.A.; University College, Dublin, M.A.; Queen's University of Belfast, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Union County, NC. E-mail—tnapier@wingate.edu.

CAREER:

Wingate University, Wingate, NC, associate professor of English.

WRITINGS:

Seeking a Country: Literary Autobiographies of Twentieth-Century Irishwomen, illustrated by Louise S. Napier, University Press of America (Lanham, MD), 2000.

Contributor to books, including The Politics and Poetics of Landscape, edited by Gill McIntosh, Lagan Press, 1998; and Back to the Present, Forward to the Past: Irish Writing 1798-1998, edited by Patricia Lynch, University of Limerick Press, 1999. Contributor to periodicals, including Journal of European Studies, Irish University Review, and Canadian Journal of Irish Studies.

SIDELIGHTS:

Taura S. Napier is an associate professor of English who specializes in Irish and post-colonial literature. Her first book, Seeking a Country: Literary Autobiographies of Twentieth-Century Irishwomen, discusses how Lady Augusta Gregory, Katharine Tynan, Mary Colum, Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien, and Eavan Boland revealed themselves through their words. All of them, Napier shows, used various methods of self-narrative, including "deflected autobiography," in which they paint a portrait of themselves by writing about others and the world around them. In explaining this process, Napier discusses how the fields of fiction, literary criticism, and family history overlap to create an acceptable form of women's autobiography in a culture that was quite patriarchal and disparaging of such work. These women, in defiance of conventions, successfully revealed their identities through their portrayals of other characters, often infusing them with their own traits. In such a way, the writers create pictures of their lives that rely not on facts, but on psychological truth. Even when they do produce a factual biography, the truth is often distorted by what they leave out. For instance, Tynan's six-volume autobiography neglects to mention her husband, and Lady Gregory's life story was written in the same fragmentary style she brought to her collections of Irish folktales. Writing in Biography, Jacqueline Belanger stated that although the book "is strangely detached from any meaningful consideration of the intersections of class, gender, and nation in twentieth century Ireland.… Napier's study is a densely-patterned and thought-provoking work."