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 21
... example , to ' self - critical ' , ' self - hatred ' , and so on . Our claim is rather that the absence of a language to describe the intricacies of emotion means also that such intricacies are largely implicit , unanalyzed and ...
... example , to ' self - critical ' , ' self - hatred ' , and so on . Our claim is rather that the absence of a language to describe the intricacies of emotion means also that such intricacies are largely implicit , unanalyzed and ...
Page 24
... example with the sense ' inherent in , depending upon , or proceeding from oneself , one's own nature etc .; belonging to oneself as an independent creature ' - attract one of the OED's occasional excursions into cultural history : ' in ...
... example with the sense ' inherent in , depending upon , or proceeding from oneself , one's own nature etc .; belonging to oneself as an independent creature ' - attract one of the OED's occasional excursions into cultural history : ' in ...
Page 26
... example, Nussbaum27 , Gagnier28 , Folkenflik29 and several collections of essays30 ), which posits the self – in some ways an anachronistic concept for much of the early modern period – as but one effect of numerous discourses and ...
... example, Nussbaum27 , Gagnier28 , Folkenflik29 and several collections of essays30 ), which posits the self – in some ways an anachronistic concept for much of the early modern period – as but one effect of numerous discourses and ...
Page 27
... example , begins her study , Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance , with a brief discussion of recent views about early modern selfhood and how it might be constituted.34 Some critics , like Eisaman Maus herself , or Debora ...
... example , begins her study , Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance , with a brief discussion of recent views about early modern selfhood and how it might be constituted.34 Some critics , like Eisaman Maus herself , or Debora ...
Page
... example , Francis Barker , The Tremulous Private Body : Essays in Subjection ( London : Methuen , 1984 ) . 38 Elizabeth Heale displays , for example , the complex strains of motivation that underpin the making of a ' will ' or final ...
... example , Francis Barker , The Tremulous Private Body : Essays in Subjection ( London : Methuen , 1984 ) . 38 Elizabeth Heale displays , for example , the complex strains of motivation that underpin the making of a ' will ' or final ...
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