Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces ─ Gwen John's Letters and Paintings

Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces explores issues, questions, and problems emerging in the analysis of epistolary and visual narratives. This book focuses in particular on Gwen John's letters and paintings. It offers an innovative theoretical approach to narrative analysis by drawing on Foucault's theory of power, Deleuze and Guattari's analytics of desire, and Cavarero's concept of the narratable self. Furthermore, it examines the use of letters as documents of life in narrative research and highlights the dynamics of spatiality in the constitution of the female self in art. This study brings together theoretical insights that emerge from the analysis of life documents---some of them previously unpublished---combining innovative research with specific methodological suggestions on doing narrative analysis.

"The most thoughtful integration of paintings and epistolary narrative that I know. Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces shows how letters do more than depict the `real' painter; the analysis problematizes the relations between visual and written texts. Insights from the author's meticulous archival research with autobiographical materials engage dynamically with Gwen John's art work, resulting in a dialogic narrative about the complex subjectivity of a woman artist working in a male-dominated world. Drawing on contemporary theory, Maria Tamboukou offers a new analytic perspective on the relation between the visual and the epistolary, which will push the `narrative turn' in social research in exciting directions." Catherine Kohler Riessman, Boston College

Maria Tamboukou is Reader in Sociology and Co-director of the Centre of Narrative Research at the University of East London. Her research interests and publications specialize in auto/biographical narratives, feminist theories, Foucauldian and Deleuzian analytics, the sociology of gender and education, gender and space and the sociology of art. She is the author of Women, Education and the Self: A Foucauldian Perspective, In the Fold between Power and Desire: Women Artists' Narratives and co-editor of Dangerous Encounter: Genealogy and Ethnography, Doing Narrative Research and Beyond Narrative Coherence.