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. |
From inside the book
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Page 22
... experienced , as it were , in the third person . The commitment of ' self ' to the of a journal is always and everywhere a conversation with God , so that one speaks of ' oneself ' in the passive voice . Consider Mary Rich , who writes ...
... experienced , as it were , in the third person . The commitment of ' self ' to the of a journal is always and everywhere a conversation with God , so that one speaks of ' oneself ' in the passive voice . Consider Mary Rich , who writes ...
Page 26
... experienced and represented among its first writers and readers.33 Such criticism encourages the conception that autobiographical works constantly engage with the shifting and developing roles and identities played by their.
... experienced and represented among its first writers and readers.33 Such criticism encourages the conception that autobiographical works constantly engage with the shifting and developing roles and identities played by their.
Page 27
... experience of interiority and its discursive expression . Katherine Eisaman Maus , for example , begins her study , Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance , with a brief discussion of recent views about early modern selfhood ...
... experience of interiority and its discursive expression . Katherine Eisaman Maus , for example , begins her study , Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance , with a brief discussion of recent views about early modern selfhood ...
Page 28
... experiences of selves at war. These chapters seek to analyze through particular texts the ways in which writers in circumstances of warfare grapple with self-identity; and to understand this struggle in both individual and civic terms ...
... experiences of selves at war. These chapters seek to analyze through particular texts the ways in which writers in circumstances of warfare grapple with self-identity; and to understand this struggle in both individual and civic terms ...
Page
... ' if we can't help it , we can't help it ' - could be satisfied at every turn . The world of early modern England , as also of generations of medieval and Renaissance - Europe , was one in which every item of experience.
... ' if we can't help it , we can't help it ' - could be satisfied at every turn . The world of early modern England , as also of generations of medieval and Renaissance - Europe , was one in which every item of experience.
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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Common terms and phrases
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