Download or read book Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse written by E. Heale and published by Springer. This book was released on 2002-12-13 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The advent of relatively cheap editions in the mid-sixteenth century produced an explosion of verse, much of which represented the first person speaker as a version of the author. This book examines ways in which writers, often seeking advancement in their careers, harnessed verse for self-promotional purposes. Texts studied include a manuscript autobiography by Thomas Whythorne, printed verse by a woman, Isabella Whitney, travel and war narratives, as well as canonical texts by Spenser, Sidney and Shakespeare.
Download or read book Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse written by Elizabeth Heale and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Early Modern Autobiography written by Ronald Bedford and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why, and in what ways, did late medieval and early modern English people write about themselves, and what was their understanding of how "selves" were made and discussed? This collection goes to the heart of current debate about literature and autobiography, addressing the contentious issues of what is meant by early modern autobiographical writing, how it was done, and what was understood by self-representation in a society whose groupings were both elaborate and highly regulated. Early Modern Autobiography considers the many ways in which autobiographical selves emerged from the late medieval period through the seventeenth century, with the aim of understanding the interaction between those individuals' lives and their worlds, the ways in which they could be recorded, and the contexts in which they are read. In addressing this historical arc, the volume develops new readings of significant autobiographical works, while also suggesting the importance of texts and contexts that have rarely been analyzed in detail, enabling the contributors to reflect on, and challenge, some prevailing ideas about what it means to write autobiographically and about the development of notions of self-representation. "The idea of the self, as seen from diverse and fascinating perspectives on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century life: this is what readers can expect from Early Modern Autobiography. A beautifully edited collection, genuinely far-reaching and insightful, Early Modern Autobiography makes known to us a great deal about how people saw themselves four hundred years ago." --Derek Cohen, Professor of English, McLaughlin College, York University "Acutely addressing a range of central issues from subjectivity to theatricality to religion, these essays will be of great interest to specialists in early modern studies and students of autobiographical writings from all eras." --Heather Dubrow, Tighe-Evans Professor and John Bascom Professor, Department of English, University of Wisconsin "The essays in this volume show where archival discoveries--memoirs, letters, account books, wills, and marginalia--can take us in understanding early modern mentalities. They document the interdependence of the abstract and the everyday, the social constructedness of self-awareness, local contexts for self-recordation, and impulses that range from legal purpose to imaginative escape. The sixteen chapters open many fascinating new perspectives on identity and personhood in Renaissance England."--Lena Cowen Orlin, Executive Director, The Shakespeare Association of America and Professor of English, University of Maryland Baltimore County Ronald Bedford is Reader in the School of English, Communication and Theatre at the Unversity of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, and author of The Defence of Truth: Herbert of Cherbury and the Seventeenth Century and Dialogues with Convention: Readings in Renaissance Poetry. The late Lloyd Davis was Reader in the School of English at the University of Queensland, and author of Guise and Disguise: Rhetoric and Characterization in the English Renaissance (1993) and editor of Sexuality and Gender in the English Renaissance (1998) and Shakespeare Matters: History, Teaching, Performance (2003). Philippa Kelly is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales, and has published widely in the areas of Shakespeare studies, cultural studies, feminism, and postcolonial studies.
Download or read book The Oxford History of Life Writing Volume 2 Early Modern written by Alan Stewart and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-10 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume2. Early Modern explores life-writing in England between 1500 and 1700, and argues that this was a period which saw remarkable innovations in biography, autobiography, and diary-keeping that laid the foundations for our modern life-writing. The challenges wrought by the upheavals and the sixteenth-century English Reformation and seventeenth-century Civil Wars moulded British and early American life-writing in unique and lasting ways. While classical and medieval models continued to exercise considerable influence, new forms began to challenge them. The English Reformation banished the saints' lives that dominated the writings of medieval Catholicism, only to replace them with new lives of Protestant martyrs. Novel forms of self-accounting came into existence: from the daily moral self-accounting dictated by strands of Calvinism, to the daily financial self-accounting modelled on the new double-entry book-keeping. This volume shows how the most ostensibly private journals were circulated to build godly communities; how women found new modes of recording and understanding their disrupted lives; how men started to compartmentalize their lives for public and private consumption. The volume doesn't intend to present a strict chronological progression from the medieval to the modern, nor to suggest the triumphant rise of the fact-based historical biography. Instead, it portrays early modern England as a site of multiple, sometimes conflicting possibilities for life-writing, all of which have something to teach us about how the period understood both the concept of a 'life' and what it mean to 'write' a life.
Download or read book Writing Wales from the Renaissance to Romanticism written by Stewart Mottram and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-11 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing Wales explores representations of Wales in English and Welsh literatures written across a broad sweep of history, from the union of Wales with England in 1536 to the beginnings of its industrialization at the turn of the nineteenth century. The collection offers a timely contribution to the current devolutionary energies that are transforming the study of British literatures today, and it builds on recent work on Wales in Renaissance, eighteenth-century, and Romantic literary studies. What is unique about Writing Wales is that it cuts across these period divisions to enable readers for the first time to chart the development of literary treatments of Wales across three of the most tumultuous centuries in the history of British state-formation. Writing Wales explores how these period divisions have helped shape scholarly treatments of Wales, and it asks if we should continue to reinforce such period divisions, or else reconfigure our approach to Wales' literary past. The essays collected here reflect the full 300-year time span of the volume and explore writers canonical and non-canonical alike: George Peele, Michael Drayton, Henry Vaughan, Katherine Philips, and John Dyer here feature alongside other lesser-known authors. The collection showcases the wide variety of literary representations of Wales, and it explores relationships between the perception of Wales in literature and the realities of its role on the British political stage.
Download or read book Tudor Autobiography written by Meredith Anne Skura and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Histories of autobiography in England often assume the genre hardly existed before 1600. But Tudor Autobiography investigates eleven sixteenth-century English writers who used sermons, a saint’s biography, courtly and popular verse, a traveler’s report, a history book, a husbandry book, and a supposedly fictional adventure novel to share the secrets of the heart and tell their life stories. In the past such texts have not been called autobiographies because they do not reveal much of the inwardness of their subject, a requisite of most modern autobiographies. But, according to Meredith Anne Skura, writers reveal themselves not only by what they say but by how they say it. Borrowing methods from affective linguistics, narratology, and psychoanalysis, Skura shows that a writer’s thoughts and feelings can be traced in his or her language. Rejecting the search for “the early modern self” in life writing, Tudor Autobiography instead asks what authors said about themselves, who wrote about themselves, how, and why. The result is a fascinating glimpse into a range of lived and imagined experience that challenges assumptions about life and autobiography in the early modern period.
Download or read book Women Madness and Sin in Early Modern England written by Katharine Hodgkin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating case study of the complex psychic relationship between religion and madness in early seventeenth-century England, the narrative presented here is a rare, detailed autobiographical account of one woman's experience of mental disorder. The writer, Dionys Fitzherbert, recounts the course of her affliction and recovery and describes various delusions and confusions, concerned with (among other things) her family and her place within it; her relation to religion; and the status of the body, death and immortality. Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England presents in modern typography an annotated edition of the author's manuscript of this unusual and compelling text. Also included are prefaces to the narrative written by Fitzherbert and others, and letters written shortly after her mental crisis, which develop her account of the episode. The edition will also give a modernized version of the original text. Katharine Hodgkin supplies a substantial introduction that places this autobiography in the context of current scholarship on early modern women, addressing the overarching issues in the field that this text touches upon. In an appendix to the volume, Hodgkin compares the two versions of the text, considering the grounds for the occasional exclusion or substitution of specific words or passages. Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England adds an important new dimension to the field of early modern women studies.
Download or read book The Author written by Andrew Bennett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-12-24 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume investigates the changing definitions of the author, what it has meant historically to be an 'author', and the impact that this has had on literary culture. Andrew Bennett presents a clearly-structured discussion of the various theoretical debates surrounding authorship, exploring such concepts as authority, ownership, originality, and the 'death' of the author. Accessible, yet stimulating, this study offers the ideal introduction to a core notion in critical theory.
Download or read book Genre and Women s Life Writing in Early Modern England written by Michelle M. Dowd and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By taking account of the ways in which early modern women made use of formal and generic structures to constitute themselves in writing, the essays collected here interrogate the discursive contours of gendered identity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The contributors explore how generic choice, mixture, and revision influence narrative constructions of the female self in early modern England. Collectively they situate women's life writings within the broader textual culture of early modern England while maintaining a focus on the particular rhetorical devices and narrative structures that comprise individual texts. Reconsidering women's life writing in light of recent critical trends-most notably historical formalism-this volume produces both new readings of early modern texts (such as Margaret Cavendish's autobiography and the diary of Anne Clifford) and a new understanding of the complex relationships between literary forms and early modern women's 'selves'. This volume engages with new critical methods to make innovative connections between canonical and non-canonical writing; in so doing, it helps to shape the future of scholarship on early modern women.
Download or read book The Oxford History of Life writing written by Alan Stewart and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1: The Middle Ages' explores the richness and variety of life writing in the Middle Ages, ranging from Anglo-Latin lives of missionaries, prelates, and princes to high medieval lives of scholars and visionaries to late medieval lives of authors and laypeople.
Download or read book Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives written by Katharine Wilson and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-02-23 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sensational narratives of John Lyly, Robert Greene, and Thomas Lodge established prose fiction as an independent genre in the late sixteenth century. The texts they created are a paradoxical blend of outrageous plotting and rhetorical sophistication, high and low culture. Although their works were feverishly devoured by contemporary readers, these writers are usually only known to students as sources for Shakespearean comedy. Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives re-examines some of the pamphleteers earlier critics christened the 'University Wits', young professionals who exposed their education and talents to the still new and uncertain world of mass market publication. These texts chart their authors' disenchantment with the limitations of romance and of their own careers, yet they also form an alternative canon of vernacular writing, which is both self-referential and self-questioning. Shocking, unpredictable, and very engaging, these narratives provide a vivid commentary on the interface between popular taste and 'English literature'.
Download or read book Early Modern English Lives written by Ronald Bedford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How 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.
Download or read book Thomas Churchyard written by Matthew Woodcock and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book-length biography of Tudor writer, soldier, and courtier Thomas Churchyard (c.1529-1604), a figure well-known yet long neglected in early modern studies, who lived, wrote, and fought under five different monarchs and enjoyed an unrivalled fifty-year literary career.
Download or read book Women Letter Writers in Tudor England written by James Daybell and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-06-29 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England represents one of the most comprehensive study of women's letters and letter-writing during the early modern period to be undertaken, and acts as an important corrective to traditional ways of reading and discussing letters as private, elite, male, and non-political. Based on over 3,000 manuscript letters, it shows that letter-writing was a larger and more socially diversified area of female activity than has been hitherto assumed. In that letters constitute the largest body of extant sixteenth-century women's writing, the book initiates a reassessment of women's education and literacy in the period. As indicators of literacy, letters yield physical evidence of rudimentary writing activity and abilities, document 'higher' forms of female literacy, and highlight women's mastery of formal rhetorical and epistolary conventions. Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England also stresses that letters are unparalleled as intimate and immediate records of family relationships, and as media for personal and self-reflective forms of female expression. Read as documents that inscribe social and gender relations, letters shed light on the complex range of women's personal relationships, as female power and authority fluctuated, negotiated on an individual basis. Furthermore, correspondence highlights the important political roles played by early modern women. Female letter-writers were integral in cultivating and maintaining patronage and kinship networks; they were active as suitors for crown favour, and operated as political intermediaries and patrons in their own right, using letters to elicit influence. Letters thus help to locate differing forms of female power within the family, locality and occasionally on the wider political stage, and offer invaluable primary evidence from which to reconstruct the lives of early modern women.
Download or read book Writing the Other written by Mike Pincombe and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An international group of scholars working in early modern English literature and culture have been invited to reflect upon one of the most dynamic dialectics of the period: the opposition between the concept “human, humanist, humanism” versus the concept “barbarous, barbarian, barbarism.” The result is Writing the Other: Humanism versus Barbarism in Tudor England. The essays in this volume range widely across the literary and cultural field mapped out by this opposition, thus revealing a rich multiplicity of voices and approaches to one of the fundamental processes by which self-fashioning and also “other-fashioning” operated during the Tudor reign. The focus moves from England to North Africa, to Hungary and to the New World in its panoramic display of the vast theatre in which identities were forged. The volume as a whole demonstrates how the cultural OtherOther was as much invented as described—“forged” in the sense, perhaps, of “counterfeited” —during the early modern and especially the Tudor period. This invention occasionally led to the demonisation of the object of its gaze, at other times its rehumanisation; sometimes we may detect evidence of a painful act of distortion, and at others we see the purposeful and profitable creation of a self-identityidentity with an eye on the rhetorical, religious, poetic, national expectations of the readers in the new context of print culture. But everywhere we witness the remarkable energy and fertility of the primary opposition which gives this collection its central theme.
Download or read book Were Early Modern Lives Different written by Andrew Hadfield and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-16 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should we assume that people who lived some time ago were quite similar to us or should we assume that they need to be thought of as alien beings with whom we have little in common? This specially commissioned collection explores this important issue through an analysis of the lives and work of a number of significant early modern writers. Shakespeare is analysed in a number of essays as authors ask whether we can learn anything about his life from reading the Sonnets and Hamlet. Other essays explore the first substantial autobiography in English, that of the musician and poet, Thomas Wythorne (1528-96); the representation of the self in Holbein’s great painting, The Ambassadors; whether we have a window into men's and women's souls when we read their intimate personal correspondence; and whether modern studies that wish to recapture the intentions and inner thoughts of early modern people who left writings behind are valuable aids to interpreting the past. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.
Download or read book The Poem and the Garden in Early Modern England written by Deborah Solomon and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book draws attention to the pervasive artistic rivalry between Elizabethan poetry and gardens in order to illustrate the benefits of a trans-media approach to the literary culture of the period. In its blending of textual studies with discussions of specific historical patches of earth, The Poem and the Garden demonstrates how the fashions that drove poetic invention were as likely to be influenced by a popular print convention or a particular garden experience as they were by the formal genres of the classical poets. By moving beyond a strictly verbal approach in its analysis of creative imitation, this volume offers new ways of appreciating the kinds of comparative and competitive methods that shaped early modern poetics. Noting shared patterns—both conceptual and material—in these two areas not only helps explain the persistence of botanical metaphors in sixteenth-century books of poetry but also offers a new perspective on the types of contrastive illusions that distinguish the Elizabethan aesthetic. With its interdisciplinary approach, The Poem and the Garden is of interest to all students and scholars who study early modern poetics, book history, and garden studies.
