Adopting a boldly innovative approach to women's autobiographical writing, Françoise Lionnet here examines the rhetoric of self-portraiture in works by authors who are bilingual or multilingual or of mixed races or cultures. Autobiographical Voices offers incisive readings of texts by Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Marie Cardinal, Maryse Condé, Marie-Thérèse Humbert, Augustine, and Nietzsche.

Françoise Lionnet is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity, also from Cornell University Press.