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 23
... eyes , as to be excessively caryed after earthly th [ ings ] , and yet not to see it as a fault , nor ones selfe unsettled ' ( p . 79 ) ; ' I feele my selfe to goe about to rouze upp my selfe ' ( p . 89 ) . An active- voice ejaculation ...
... eyes , as to be excessively caryed after earthly th [ ings ] , and yet not to see it as a fault , nor ones selfe unsettled ' ( p . 79 ) ; ' I feele my selfe to goe about to rouze upp my selfe ' ( p . 89 ) . An active- voice ejaculation ...
Page 25
... eyes was Black lyke my father's , and the form and aspect of them was quick and lively like my Mother's . The haire of myne head was Browne and thick , and so long that it reached to the Calfe of my Legges when I stood upright , with a ...
... eyes was Black lyke my father's , and the form and aspect of them was quick and lively like my Mother's . The haire of myne head was Browne and thick , and so long that it reached to the Calfe of my Legges when I stood upright , with a ...
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... Eye : The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets ( Berkeley : University of California Press , 1986 ) ; Harold Bloom , Shakespeare : the Invention of the Human ( New York : Riverhead Books , 1998 ) . 37 See , for example ...
... Eye : The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets ( Berkeley : University of California Press , 1986 ) ; Harold Bloom , Shakespeare : the Invention of the Human ( New York : Riverhead Books , 1998 ) . 37 See , for example ...
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... eye ' - thoughts which provoke the following verse and commentary : Who that will weigh , of ages all , Their change of shapes from time to time , What childish thoughts to younglings fall , As years wax ripe how they do climb , May ...
... eye ' - thoughts which provoke the following verse and commentary : Who that will weigh , of ages all , Their change of shapes from time to time , What childish thoughts to younglings fall , As years wax ripe how they do climb , May ...
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... , and now doth time waste me , For now hath time made me his numb'ring clock . My thoughts are minutes , and with sighs they jar Their watches on unto mine eyes , the outward watch Whereto my finger , like a dial's point , Is.
... , and now doth time waste me , For now hath time made me his numb'ring clock . My thoughts are minutes , and with sighs they jar Their watches on unto mine eyes , the outward watch Whereto my finger , like a dial's point , Is.
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