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As modes of discourse explicitly consolidating that bourgeois, white, heterosexual, masculine 'subject" whose transcendence began to be thoroughly challenged in the 1960s, biography and autobiography were obvious targets for a poststructuralist revisioning of literary studies. However, as many critics have pointed out, the sea change in Anglo-American literary studies effected primarily by French philosophical theory in the late 1960s and early 1970s was concurrent with the emergence of a female subject that many feminist academics argued was necessary to redress centuries of neglect. Roland Barthes may have proclaimed the death of the author in 1968, but workers in "that post Woolfi an "room of our own" we call Women's Studies' (Stanton 1998, 132) were then busily researching women's lives, designing courses around the work of women writers, and beginning to establish a female literary canon.¹ When Michel Foucault asked "What difference does it make who is speaking?" (Foucault 1984, 120) some critics answered that it made a very signifi cant difference indeed.²

DOI: 10.1057/9780230206045_5

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