M Jolly
Biographic Data
| ID | 3610 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Jolly |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Jolly |
| SIGNATURE | JOLLY M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sussex |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0262-1145 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 72 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Survival Writing: Autobiography versus Primatology in the Conservation Diaries of Alison Jolly: The 2019 Hogan Prize
Feminist cash for feminist culture: Considering philanthropy in the UK women’s liberation movement, Black power and beyond
Feminists of the 1960s-80s linked women’s emancipation to economic, social and political equality. So, despite long traditions of women’s giving, activists seeking financial support for their work generally looked to public funders or trade, whilst philanthropy was rejected. Women with wealth in turn experienced uncertainty, guilt or shame in how to give or invest in political contexts. Yet in fact women did donate to feminist ventures, including…
Listening Projects: The BBC, Oral History, and the Nation in Fractured Times
This article tunes in to the BBC’s heart-warming radio program, The Listening Project (TLP), aired from 2012 until 2022. Comparing TLP to its source model from the U.S., StoryCorps, to previous British public access broadcasting initiatives such as Open Door and Video Nation, as well as to social media, I highlight the interests at stake in the BBC’s presentation of listening in the service of imagined national community, an idea echoed by the Br…
Purpose, Power and Profit in Feminist Publishing: An Introduction
Introducing a special issue about the business aspects of feminist and women’s movement publishing, this article surveys the perennial tensions between cultural and political aims and the economic models necessary for sustainable operation. Addressing a range of beloved periodicals and book publishing ventures, including Spare Rib, Ms, Red Rag, Virago, Des Femmes, Honno, Sheba, Bogle L’Ouverture, Onlywomen Outwrite, The F-Word, The Vagenda, Femin…
The Making of Mamatoto: Virago, the Body Shop and Feminist Business Strategy
This article explores a collaboration between Virago Press and the Body Shop (TBS) to shine a light on feminist and women’s business, what they have shared historically and how they could work together in late twentieth-century Britain. It uses as a lens the 1991 sale of a Body Shop book, Mamatoto: A Celebration of Birth, to Virago Press. The processes and outcome raise thorny questions: how can political commitments lead to business innovation? …
Curating Women’s Business: A Feminist Publishing Perspective
This article takes the form of an interview with Polly Russell, the Lead Curator for Contemporary Politics and Public Life in the Manuscripts and Archives department at the British Library 2015–20, who is also British Library partner to the Business of Women’s Words project, led by interviewer Margaretta Jolly. Russell discusses if and how archival practices capture radical business histories and how they could be developed to further connect and…
Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction by Laura Marcus
Reviewed by: Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction by Laura Marcus Margaretta Jolly (bio) Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction Laura Marcus Oxford UP, 2018, 168 pp. ISBN 9780199669240, $11.95 paperback. For those in a hurry to know what autobiography is all about, Laura Marcus's Autobiography is the answer. In 145 pocketbook-size pages, one of the field's best analysts distills years of thinking to argue that memory, form, purpose, truth, …
Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of the UK Women's Liberation Movement, 1968-present
This ground-breaking history of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement explores the individual and collective memories of women at its heart. Spanning at least two generations and four nations, and moving through the tumultuous decades from the 1970s to the present, the narrative is powered by feminist oral history, notably the British Library’s Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project. The book mines these precious archives …
Survival Writing: Autobiography versus Primatology in the Conservation Diaries of Alison Jolly
Donna Haraway’s ecological visions frame this exploration of the author’s mother Alison Jolly’s writings as a primatologist of ring-tailed lemurs. Alison Jolly, the author proposes, chose auto|biographical modes to unsettle anthropomorphic and western perspectives, and to enhance conservation efforts in Madagascar. The author finds solace in this and in Haraway’s ideas about survival as the publisher of her mother’s diaries after her death
Hearing Her: Comparing Feminist Oral History in the UK and China
This article compares the China Women’s Oral History Project, directed by librarians at the China Women’s University in Beijing, and Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project, directed by scholars at the University of Sussex in the UK. While the projects share aspects of method, our practices wrestle with distinct historiographical structures which are entwined with a history of state feminism in China and with dissenting,…
Selves in Question: Interviews on Southern African Auto/biography
Wide-ranging and engaging, Selves in Question considers the various ways in which auto/biographical accounts situate and question the self in contemporary southern Africa.The twenty-seven interviews presented here consider both the ontological status and the representation of the self. They remind us that the self is constantly under construction in webs of interlocution and that its status and representation are always in question. The contribut…
Epistolarity: Life after Death of the Letter
Exploring what is at stake in the common lament that letter writing is dead, we cautiously celebrate a new age of ‘e-epistolarity’. In doing so, we build on our collaborative article of 2006, ‘Letters as/Not a Genre’, to consider the ongoing pacts, politics and arts in written relationship and the mixed methods that academics might adopt in analysing the growing archives of digital and digitised communication. As with our earlier piece, the essay…
Voices in Movement: Feminist Family Stories in Oral History and Sound Art
Voices in Movement, a sound installation directed by artist Lizzie Thynne with music by Ed Hughes, draws on memories recorded for Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project. Both the installation and oral history foreground family stories as central to feminist politics, though in diverse and shifting ways. As the producer of the installation and director of the oral history project, I explore how these representations of t…
[ Article WITHDRAWN ] 'The Feelings Behind the Slogans': Abortion Campaigning and Feminist Mood-Work circa 1979
Where does public mood live? How can it be stimulated and how is it apprehended? In this essay I explore these questions by considering the so-called 'winter of discontent' at the end of 1978, a set-piece in British history-telling in which public dissatisfaction with trade union power supposedly propelled the election victory of the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Ben Highmore suggests this 'mooding' underplays the pleasures…
Recognising Place, Space and Nation in Researching Women's Movements: Sisterhood and After
Researching women's movements: An introduction to Femcit and Sisterhood and After
Assessing the impact of women's movements: Sisterhood and after
Sisterhood and After: Individualism, Ethics and an Oral History of the Women's Liberation Movement
In this article, we address the question of ethics in the study of social movements from the perspective of ‘Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation Oral History Project’, which will record life history interviews of 50 key activists in the UK for the British Library Sound Archive. Our research is inspired by the democratic ideals of oral historical methods and of feminism itself, yet we have discovered tensions concerning the status of indi…
In Remembrance: Dr. Julia Swindells (13 August 1951 - 29 October 2011)
In RemembranceDr. Julia Swindells (13 August 1951 – 29 October 2011) Margaretta Jolly Click for larger view View full resolution Julia Swindells was a pioneering theorist of life writing in Britain, known for Victorian Writing and Working Women: The Other Side of Silence, published in 1985. In this, her first book, she argued that autobiographers like domestic worker Elizabeth Ham or governess Ellen Weeton constructed discursive life narratives o…
Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives , and: Memoir: An Introduction (review)
What I Never Wanted to Tell You: Therapeutic Letter Writing in Cultural Context
Life Writing as Critical Creative Practice
This essay offers an overview of the development of life writing criticism from its status as an outsider of English studies to a flourishing interdisciplinary field. I argue that one of the characteristics of this history has been a schism between critics of life writing and life writers themselves, a schism that echoes the well known ambivalence literary critics and writers generally feel towards each other even as, ironically, there has always…
Introduction: Life Writing and Critical Practice
Contemporary critical practice is becoming increasingly self‐reflective, with first person commentary and subjective musings appearing in academic texts produced across disciplines. On the other hand, as the number of writing practitioners in the academy mounts, their works reflect a growing awareness of, and engagement with, the critical and theoretical debates that surround creative practice. Nowhere is this interchange between theory and pract…
Lamenting the Letter and the Truth about Email
But don't you know that the art of letter writing is dying? It seems that any talk about letters these days provokes lament for the lost country of proper address in the age of electronic mail. Yet how far is this nostalgia based on an accurate perception of what either email or letter writing entails? An analysis of key features of each genre shows far more overlap than is commonly imagined. In this paper, I argue that email is a very different …
Consenting Voices? Activist Life Stories and Complex Dissent
What can life stories reveal about political dissenters who were once on the margins but have moved centrewards? This journey is one that many activist autobiographers have taken, from the Lavender Menace-turned- academic Karla Jay to the spectacular example of President Obama after writing his memoir Dreams From My Father. Do life stories help us to understand patterns of dissent and consent? Can they indeed balance judgements about insiders, ou…
Letters as / not a genre
With the rise of life writing studies, letters have become the subject of an increasing number of interdisciplinary analyses. The following essay ruminates on what common characteristics hold such analyses together and the peculiar difficulties they encounter in theorising a genre that perhaps, out of all writing practices, most exposes the limits of genre theory itself. The essay is written, appropriately, as a dialogue, in which Margaretta's Vo…
Coming Out of the Coming Out Story: Writing Queer Lives
This article examines the challenges posed to the western lesbian and gay life writing paradigm of the coming out story by postmodern and global cultures. It reads two memoirs published in the 1990s that `queer' the coming out plot, one of an American lesbian-turned-heterosexual, the other of a Chinese woman describing her relationships with women and men during the Cultural Revolution. Jan Clausen's Apples and Oranges: My Journey Through Sexual …
Consenting Voices? Activist Life Stories and Complex Dissent
What can life stories reveal about political dissenters who were once on the margins but have moved centrewards? This journey is one that many activist autobiographers have taken, from the Lavender Menace-turned- academic Karla Jay to the spectacular example of President Obama after writing his memoir Dreams From My Father. Do life stories help us to understand patterns of dissent and consent? Can they indeed balance judgements about insiders, ou…
Introduction: Epistolarity in the Twenty-First Century
(2006). Introduction: Epistolarity in the Twenty-First Century. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 21, Epistolarity in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 1-6
The Making of Mamatoto: Virago, the Body Shop and Feminist Business Strategy
This article explores a collaboration between Virago Press and the Body Shop (TBS) to shine a light on feminist and women’s business, what they have shared historically and how they could work together in late twentieth-century Britain. It uses as a lens the 1991 sale of a Body Shop book, Mamatoto: A Celebration of Birth, to Virago Press. The processes and outcome raise thorny questions: how can political commitments lead to business innovation? …
Voices in Movement: Feminist Family Stories in Oral History and Sound Art
Voices in Movement, a sound installation directed by artist Lizzie Thynne with music by Ed Hughes, draws on memories recorded for Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project. Both the installation and oral history foreground family stories as central to feminist politics, though in diverse and shifting ways. As the producer of the installation and director of the oral history project, I explore how these representations of t…
Recognising Place, Space and Nation in Researching Women's Movements: Sisterhood and After
Sisterhood and After: Individualism, Ethics and an Oral History of the Women's Liberation Movement
In this article, we address the question of ethics in the study of social movements from the perspective of ‘Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation Oral History Project’, which will record life history interviews of 50 key activists in the UK for the British Library Sound Archive. Our research is inspired by the democratic ideals of oral historical methods and of feminism itself, yet we have discovered tensions concerning the status of indi…
Lamenting the Letter and the Truth about Email
But don't you know that the art of letter writing is dying? It seems that any talk about letters these days provokes lament for the lost country of proper address in the age of electronic mail. Yet how far is this nostalgia based on an accurate perception of what either email or letter writing entails? An analysis of key features of each genre shows far more overlap than is commonly imagined. In this paper, I argue that email is a very different …
Purpose, Power and Profit in Feminist Publishing: An Introduction
Introducing a special issue about the business aspects of feminist and women’s movement publishing, this article surveys the perennial tensions between cultural and political aims and the economic models necessary for sustainable operation. Addressing a range of beloved periodicals and book publishing ventures, including Spare Rib, Ms, Red Rag, Virago, Des Femmes, Honno, Sheba, Bogle L’Ouverture, Onlywomen Outwrite, The F-Word, The Vagenda, Femin…
Survival Writing: Autobiography versus Primatology in the Conservation Diaries of Alison Jolly
Donna Haraway’s ecological visions frame this exploration of the author’s mother Alison Jolly’s writings as a primatologist of ring-tailed lemurs. Alison Jolly, the author proposes, chose auto|biographical modes to unsettle anthropomorphic and western perspectives, and to enhance conservation efforts in Madagascar. The author finds solace in this and in Haraway’s ideas about survival as the publisher of her mother’s diaries after her death
Epistolarity: Life after Death of the Letter
Exploring what is at stake in the common lament that letter writing is dead, we cautiously celebrate a new age of ‘e-epistolarity’. In doing so, we build on our collaborative article of 2006, ‘Letters as/Not a Genre’, to consider the ongoing pacts, politics and arts in written relationship and the mixed methods that academics might adopt in analysing the growing archives of digital and digitised communication. As with our earlier piece, the essay…
Researching women's movements: An introduction to Femcit and Sisterhood and After
Introduction: Life Writing as Intimate Publics
This special issue of Biography begins from the US cultural critic Lauren Berlant's term "intimate public" to explore new constituencies of belonging in relation to life writing and life storying across media. Life writing creates affect worlds, where strangers meet through emotional connection, worlds that are economically and politically dynamic. This collection assesses them as global forms, including British televisual genealogy, post-Communi…
Desert Island Texts
Speaking personally, academically
Review essay of Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer, Jackie Stacey, Routledge, London and New York, 1997 and Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West, Ien Ang, Routledge, London and New York, 2001. I use these books, amongst others, as a springboard to explore the phenomenon of 'personal criticism' or autobiographical academic writing
The Exile and the Ghostwriter: East-West Biographical Politics and the Private Life of Chairman Mao
The Private Life of Chairman Mao, by Zhisui Li, Mao Zedong's private doctor for twenty-two years, was originally published in 1994, in the United States. 1 Li's intimate biography of Mao gives a shocking account of life behind the scenes of the top-level Communist Party inner circle from 1954 to Mao's death in 1976. As a doctor, Li was privy to Mao at his most vulnerable, and much of the drama of the book comes from the extreme contrast between L…
The epistemology of pornography: Between images and acts
The feminist debate over pornography has been long and painful. It is also fascinating. One of its most interesting aspects is how it has become a direct test case for different theories of representation. Such theories claim to explain the relation of discourse to society, or put more simply, image to reality. But pornography persistently tests and confuses our definitions of what is 'act' and what is 'image'. In this article I will examine the …
The epistemology of pornography: Between images and acts
The feminist debate over pornography has been long and painful. It is also fascinating. One of its most interesting aspects is how it has become a direct test case for different theories of representation. Such theories claim to explain the relation of discourse to society, or put more simply, image to reality. But pornography persistently tests and confuses our definitions of what is 'act' and what is 'image'. In this article I will examine the …
Defining a Field: The Encyclopedia of Life Writing
The Encyclopedia of Life Writing, which I edited for Fitzroy Dearborn (subsequently Routledge), is the first large-scale reference work to tackle this subject area. The Encyclopedia contains 800-plus large-format, double-column pages, and includes some 650 entries on the various forms of auto/biographical writing that constitute the field now known as writing. My aim was to bring together for the first time the work on life writing across the glo…
Radclyffe hall: A Woman Called John
About Chinese Women
The Exile and the Ghostwriter: East-West Biographical Politics and the Private Life of Chairman Mao
The Private Life of Chairman Mao, by Zhisui Li, Mao Zedong's private doctor for twenty-two years, was originally published in 1994, in the United States. 1 Li's intimate biography of Mao gives a shocking account of life behind the scenes of the top-level Communist Party inner circle from 1954 to Mao's death in 1976. As a doctor, Li was privy to Mao at his most vulnerable, and much of the drama of the book comes from the extreme contrast between L…
Coming Out of the Coming Out Story: Writing Queer Lives
This article examines the challenges posed to the western lesbian and gay life writing paradigm of the coming out story by postmodern and global cultures. It reads two memoirs published in the 1990s that `queer' the coming out plot, one of an American lesbian-turned-heterosexual, the other of a Chinese woman describing her relationships with women and men during the Cultural Revolution. Jan Clausen's Apples and Oranges: My Journey Through Sexual …
Biographical Research (review)
Brian Roberts. Biographical Research. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press/Taylor and Francis, 2002. 212 pp. ISBN 0-335-2087-X, $26.95
Feminist heterosexuality
This article explores the vexed relationship between feminism and heterosexuality from the point of view of the desire for politics, rather than the more usual take of finding a politics of desire. Sexual and emotional passions and repressions arise in any liberation movement, and often are integral to the meaning and shape that political activism takes. Women's movements have been no exception, although those movements have been extremely varied…
Letters as / not a genre
With the rise of life writing studies, letters have become the subject of an increasing number of interdisciplinary analyses. The following essay ruminates on what common characteristics hold such analyses together and the peculiar difficulties they encounter in theorising a genre that perhaps, out of all writing practices, most exposes the limits of genre theory itself. The essay is written, appropriately, as a dialogue, in which Margaretta's Vo…
Speaking personally, academically
Review essay of Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer, Jackie Stacey, Routledge, London and New York, 1997 and Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West, Ien Ang, Routledge, London and New York, 2001. I use these books, amongst others, as a springboard to explore the phenomenon of 'personal criticism' or autobiographical academic writing
E-Mail in a Global Age: "The Ethical Story of "Women on the Net
In presenting e-mail as "the story behind the story" in an age of global autobiography, through a close reading of autobiographical and dialogic aspects of email exchanges within the feminist group Women on the Net, this article suggests that e-mail, like all letters, is best understood in terms of an ethics of care, which extends more customary ethics of justice to engage directly with the relational dimension of life writing
Nuclear Nights: The Women's Peace Movement and the History of Dreaming
This paper draws on materialist theories of dreaming to contextualise records of nightmares about nuclear war from the early 1980s British and North American womens peace movement, in particular the dreams recorded in Alice Cook and Gwyn Kirks book Greenham Women Everywhere (1983). Such nightmares do not only suggest evidence of collective dreaming but provide a remarkable case of the collective interpretation of dreams as they were taken up as a…
Introduction: Epistolarity in the Twenty-First Century
(2006). Introduction: Epistolarity in the Twenty-First Century. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 21, Epistolarity in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 1-6
In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism
Winner of the 2009 Feminist and Women's Studies Association Book Prize Do you think I can be a feminist mother? Did I make you and your kisses up in my mind? Will you join our military protest at the gate? Will you feed the kids when I'm in prison? Are you able to forgive me for breaking off this correspondence because you are a man? During the women's movement of the 1970s and 1980s, feminists in the United States and Britain reinvented the imag…
Paul John Eakin and the Psychology of English
The work of the autobiography critic Paul John Eakin, while coming squarely out of the discipline of English, attempts to join literature and psychology without relying on psychoanalysis. In doing so, Eakin exposes the sophistications of English to be based on a model of selfhood that is deeply impoverished. In this brief article, we attempt to follow Eakins own journey through and away from psychoanalysis as a means to open up a more general dia…
On Burning, Saving and Stealing Letters
Most people do not keep the letters or emails they receive, let alone copies of their own; the very idea can strike one as hubristic. But these exchanges can have dangerous afterlives. Some letters are sombrely preserved, even sent to archives and editors, while others are disposed of equally seriously. Burning a letter describes many literary denouements for that reason. Destroying a personal letter is especially associated with love or family g…
Desert Island Texts
Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives , and: Memoir: An Introduction (review)
What I Never Wanted to Tell You: Therapeutic Letter Writing in Cultural Context
Life Writing as Critical Creative Practice
This essay offers an overview of the development of life writing criticism from its status as an outsider of English studies to a flourishing interdisciplinary field. I argue that one of the characteristics of this history has been a schism between critics of life writing and life writers themselves, a schism that echoes the well known ambivalence literary critics and writers generally feel towards each other even as, ironically, there has always…
Introduction: Life Writing and Critical Practice
Contemporary critical practice is becoming increasingly self‐reflective, with first person commentary and subjective musings appearing in academic texts produced across disciplines. On the other hand, as the number of writing practitioners in the academy mounts, their works reflect a growing awareness of, and engagement with, the critical and theoretical debates that surround creative practice. Nowhere is this interchange between theory and pract…
Lamenting the Letter and the Truth about Email
But don't you know that the art of letter writing is dying? It seems that any talk about letters these days provokes lament for the lost country of proper address in the age of electronic mail. Yet how far is this nostalgia based on an accurate perception of what either email or letter writing entails? An analysis of key features of each genre shows far more overlap than is commonly imagined. In this paper, I argue that email is a very different …
Consenting Voices? Activist Life Stories and Complex Dissent
What can life stories reveal about political dissenters who were once on the margins but have moved centrewards? This journey is one that many activist autobiographers have taken, from the Lavender Menace-turned- academic Karla Jay to the spectacular example of President Obama after writing his memoir Dreams From My Father. Do life stories help us to understand patterns of dissent and consent? Can they indeed balance judgements about insiders, ou…
Introduction: Life Writing as Intimate Publics
This special issue of Biography begins from the US cultural critic Lauren Berlant's term "intimate public" to explore new constituencies of belonging in relation to life writing and life storying across media. Life writing creates affect worlds, where strangers meet through emotional connection, worlds that are economically and politically dynamic. This collection assesses them as global forms, including British televisual genealogy, post-Communi…
Recognising Place, Space and Nation in Researching Women's Movements: Sisterhood and After
Sociology (33 works) · Political science (25 works) · Law (22 works) · Art (20 works) · History (19 works) · Politics (18 works) · Gender Studies (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing (14 works) · Literature (14 works)