‘I keep my head down, quite invisible in this picture-book scene’: Poetics and Politics of In/visibility in Yrsa Daley-Ward’s The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir (2018)
This article examines Yrsa Daley-Ward’s The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir (2018) as a formal and political reconfiguration of contemporary life writing. It argues that the memoir’s political force lies less in the singularity of the experiences it recounts than in the formal strategies through wh...
محفوظ في:
| الحاوية / القاعدة: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
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| المؤلف الرئيسي: | |
| التنسيق: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| اللغة: | Anglais |
| منشور في: |
Études britanniques contemporaines
2026
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| الموضوعات: | |
| الوصول للمادة أونلاين: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| الملخص: | This article examines Yrsa Daley-Ward’s The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir (2018) as a formal and political reconfiguration of contemporary life writing. It argues that the memoir’s political force lies less in the singularity of the experiences it recounts than in the formal strategies through which those experiences are rendered perceptible. Drawing on life-writing studies, trauma studies, vulnerability studies, in/visibility studies, and decolonial criticism, the article shows how Daley-Ward places the memoir genre under strain by disrupting conventions of coherence, linearity, and stable selfhood traditionally associated with Western autobiography. Through generic hybridity, poetic fragmentation, polyphonic narration, and non-linear temporalities, The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir produces a form of dissensus in the Rancièrian sense, redistributing the sensible and making visible subjectivities historically marginalised within British cultural and literary fields. Ultimately, the article contends that Daley-Ward’s memoir enacts an ethics of attention grounded in relationality, vulnerability, and decolonial resistance. |
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