Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation 1500–1660How did early modern English people write about themselves, and how do we listen to their voices four centuries later? The authors of Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation 1500-1660 argue that identity is depicted through complex, subtle, and often contradictory social interactions and literary forms. Diaries, letters, daily spiritual reckonings, household journals, travel journals, accounts of warfare, incidental meditations on the nature of time, death and self-reflection, as well as life stories themselves: these are just some of the texts that allow us to address the social and historical conditions that influenced early modern self-writing. The texts explored in Early Modern English Lives do not automatically speak to our familiar patterns of introspection and self-inquiry. Often formal, highly metaphorical and emotionally restrained, they are very different in both tone and purpose from the autobiographies that crowd bookshelves today. Does the lack of emotional description suggest that complex emotions themselves, in all the depth and variety that we now understand (and expect of) them, are a relatively modern phenomenon? This is one of the questions addressed by Early Modern English Lives. The authors bring to our attention the kinds of rhetorical and generic features of early modern self-representation that can help us to appreciate people living four hundred years ago as the complicated, composite figures they were: people whose expression of identity involved an elaborate interplay of roles and discourses, and for whom the notion of privacy itself was a wholly different phenomenon. |
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Page 20
... Ralph Josselin , Diary 1 This most unremarkable of diary entries - a brief account by Ralph Josselin of catching a cold on his way to Cranham – provides a way into some features that fuel our study of early modern English autobiography ...
... Ralph Josselin , Diary 1 This most unremarkable of diary entries - a brief account by Ralph Josselin of catching a cold on his way to Cranham – provides a way into some features that fuel our study of early modern English autobiography ...
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... Ralph Josselin ) who reappear in different chapters , interacting with the diverse figures who , for reasons of space as well as discussional development , might appear in our study in only one context . We will also link the structures ...
... Ralph Josselin ) who reappear in different chapters , interacting with the diverse figures who , for reasons of space as well as discussional development , might appear in our study in only one context . We will also link the structures ...
Page 29
... Ralph Josselin, 1616–1683, ed. Alan Macfarlane (London: Oxford University Press, for the British Academy, 1976), 29 March 1644, p. 15. 'Emotion', as 'physical stirring', was first recorded in 1579, and it was used to describe 'any ...
... Ralph Josselin, 1616–1683, ed. Alan Macfarlane (London: Oxford University Press, for the British Academy, 1976), 29 March 1644, p. 15. 'Emotion', as 'physical stirring', was first recorded in 1579, and it was used to describe 'any ...
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... Ralph Josselin. In the next chapter, in which issues of autobiography and temporality are further considered, it is argued that the locators of time and space seem to be regarded in the period as in some sense always double (both 'here ...
... Ralph Josselin. In the next chapter, in which issues of autobiography and temporality are further considered, it is argued that the locators of time and space seem to be regarded in the period as in some sense always double (both 'here ...
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Contents
18 | |
Time Death and Memorialization | |
Travelling Selves | |
Language and the Mirror | |
The Expedition to Cadiz 1625 | |
The Civil | |
Autobiographical Writings by Three Early Modern Women | |
Womens Wills | |
Bibliography | |
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authors autobiography body Cadiz Cambridge Cecil century Clifford clock Conduct Literature Coryate Couerte cultural Dallam death depicts diary discourse early modern English Elias Ashmole Elizabeth Elizabethan Elyot England English entries eternal example experience eyes Fleet gender genre God's hath Henry Henry Unton Hoby husband identity individual inheritance John Josselin kind King Lady Anne Lady Anne Clifford Lady Grace Lady Margaret life-writing lives London looking glass Lord Madox marriage Mildmay mind mirror moral narrative Norwood offers one's Oxford painting physical Pike poem portrait Ralph Josselin readers record reflection relationship Religio Medici Renaissance Richard Richard Rogers Rowland Lockey self-representation selfhood sense servant seventeenth-century Shakespeare ships siege Sir Thomas social soldiers Sonnets soul Spanish spiritual suggests temporal texts Thomas Coryate Thomas Salter Thomas Whythorne travel journals University Press unto voyage Whythorne's widow wife woman women Women Writers Project words writing