Download or read book Autobiography in Early Modern England written by Adam Smyth and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-05 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores life-writing forms - almanacs, financial accounts, commonplace books and parish registers - which emerged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
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 Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature written by Sharon Cadman Seelig and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-02 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early modern autobiographies and diaries provide a unique insight into women's lives and how they remembered, interpreted and represented their experiences. Sharon Seelig analyzes the writings of six seventeenth-century women: diaries by Margaret Hoby and Anne Clifford, more extended narratives by Lucy Hutchinson, Ann Fanshawe, and Anne Halkett, and the extraordinarily varied and self-dramatizing publications of Margaret Cavendish. Combining an original account of the development of autobiography with analysis of the texts, Seelig explores the relation between the writers' choices of genre and form and the stories they chose to tell.
Download or read book Early Modern English Lives written by Ronald Bedford and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2007 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early Modern English Lives examines sixteenth- and seventeenth-century autobiographical practices in key contexts and modes of self-representation. Moving between diaries, letters, journals, memoirs, household and personal accounts, and major autobiographical texts, the study explores the social and historical conditions that shaped early modern life-writing. The authors argue that expressions of personal identity, along with the notion of privacy itself, involved an elaborate interplay of generic roles and cultural discourses.
Download or read book Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint written by Cecilia Ferrazzi and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charged by the Venetian Inquisition with the conscious and cynical feigning of holiness, Cecelia Ferrazzi (1609-1684) requested and obtained the unprecedented opportunity to defend herself through a presentation of her life story. Ferrazzi's unique inquisitorial autobiography and the transcripts of her preceding testimony, expertly transcribed and eloquently translated into English, allow us to enter an unfamiliar sector of the past and hear 'another voice'—that of a humble Venetian woman who had extraordinary experiences and exhibited exceptional courage. Born in 1609 into an artisan family, Cecilia Ferrazzi wanted to become a nun. When her parents' death in the plague of 1630 made it financially impossible for her to enter the convent, she refused to marry and as a single laywoman set out in pursuit of holiness. Eventually she improvised a vocation: running houses of refuge for "girls in danger," young women at risk of being lured into prostitution. Ferrazzi's frequent visions persuaded her, as well as some clerics and acquaintances among the Venetian elite, that she was on the right track. The socially valuable service she was providing enhanced this impresssion. Not everyone, however, was convinced that she was a genuine favorite of God. In 1664 she was denounced to the Inquisition. The Inquisition convicted Ferrazzi of the pretense of sanctity. Yet her autobiographical act permits us to see in vivid detail both the opportunities and the obstacles presented to seventeenth-century women.
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 Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century Anglophone World written by Kathleen Lynch and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-22 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a new view of the historical conditions and methods by which godly communities turned personal experience into an authorizing principle. A broad range of life-writing is explored, including Augustine's Confessions, John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, and Richard Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae.
Download or read book Early Modern French Autobiography written by Nicolae Alexandru Virastau and published by Egodocuments and History. This book was released on 2021 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a survey of the constitution of the French memoir tradition, and explores in detail the works of four representative authors: Philippe de Commynes, Louise de Savoie, Philippe de Cheverny, and François de Bassompierre. Works of self-writing were usually printed under the title of "memoirs" and have been often considered a uniform genre. These early forms of self-writing were in fact highly heterogenous works at the crossroads of multiple genres, from the account book to the astrological diary. Their writing, printing, and circulation challenge modern notions of autobiographical genres: their authorship is often questionable and collective, and they tended to be compiled in large collections for political ends, without regard to the authors' intention.
Download or read book The Lieutenant Nun written by Sherry Velasco and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is an exciting, well-organized overview of the evolution of a cultural icon: the nun-ensign Catalina de Erauso. . . . It will be of interest not only to Hispanists, but also to students of gender, theater, and film." -Anne J. Cruz, Professor of Spanish, University of Illinois, Chicago Catalina de Erauso (1592-1650) was a Basque noblewoman who, just before taking final vows to become a nun, escaped from the convent at San Sebastián, dressed as a man, and, in her own words, "went hither and thither, embarked, went into port, took to roving, slew, wounded, embezzled, and roamed about." Her long service fighting for the Spanish empire in Peru and Chile won her a soldier's pension and a papal dispensation to continue dressing in men's clothing. This theoretically informed study analyzes the many ways in which the "Lieutenant Nun" has been constructed, interpreted, marketed, and consumed by both the dominant and divergent cultures in Europe, Latin America, and the United States from the seventeenth century to the present. Sherry Velasco argues that the ways in which literary, theatrical, iconographic, and cinematic productions have transformed Erauso's life experience into a public spectacle show how transgender narratives expose and manipulate spectators' fears and desires. Her book thus reveals what happens when the private experience of a transgenderist is shifted to the public sphere and thereby marketed as a hybrid spectacle for the curious gaze of the general audience.
Download or read book The Life of Catalina de Erauso the Lieutenant Nun written by Sonia Pérez-Villanueva and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Life of Catalina de Erauso, the Lieutenant Nun: An Early Modern Autobiography examines Vida y sucesos de la Monja Alférez as a form of autobiography through a comparative study with early-modern secular life narratives: the picaresque novels La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, y de sus fortunas y adversidades (anonymous), La pícara Justina by Francisco López de Úbeda, the chronicle Relación que dio Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca de lo acaescido en las Indias en la armada donde yva por governador Pánfilo de Narváez desde el año de veynte y siete hasta el año de treinta y seis que bolvió a Sevilla con tres de su compañía by Cabeza de Vaca and the soldier’s narrative Vida, nacimiento, padres, y crianza del Capitán Alonso de Contreras natural de Madrid Cavallero del orden de San Juan Comendador de una de sus encomiendas en Castilla, escrita por el mismo by Alonso de Contreras. Two questions are addressed: How is Vida y sucesos similar to or different from picaresque novels, chronicles of the New World, and soldiers’ narratives? How are the similarities and differences between Vida y sucesos and these forms of writing related to theoretical parameters for an autobiography? In order to conduct this comparative analysis, four theoretical parameters are established for assessing autobiographical texts. These parameters (coincidence of narrator and protagonist, historical referentiality, whether the subjective narration has a plausible basis in the experience and belief structure of the narrator and the intention of the narrator to tell an autobiographical truth) are based upon the critical approach of hybridity and intersubjectivity, but also draw upon related theoretical work. This book argues that Vida y sucesos should be considered as a form of autobiography, with the understanding that autobiography is an intersubjective and hybrid form or a forma fronteriza.
Download or read book The Origins of the Individualist Self written by Michael Mascuch and published by Polity. This book was released on 1997-03-06 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the emergence of the concept of self-identity in modern Western culture, as it was both reflected in and advanced by the development of autobiographical practice in early modern England. It offers a fresh and illuminating appraisal of the nature of autobiographical narrative in general and of the early modern forms of biography, diary and autobiography in particular. The result is a significant and original contribution to the history of individualism. Michael Mascuch argues that the definitive characteristic of individualist self-identity is the personal capacity to produce a unified retrospective autobiographical narrative, and he stresses that this capacity was first demonstrated in England during the last decade of the eighteenth century. He examines the long-term process of innovation in written discourse leading up to this event, from the first use of blank almanacs and common place books by the pious in the late sixteenth century, through the popular criminal biographies of the late seventeenth century, to the printed-for-the-author scandalous memoirs of the mid-eighteenth century. While offering a detailed account of a significant period in the rise of a modern literary genre, Origins of the Individualist Self also addresses topics which are central in the fields of literary and cultural theory and social and cultural history.
Download or read book The Evangelical Conversion Narrative written by D. Bruce Hindmarsh and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thousands of ordinary women and men experienced evangelical conversion and turned to a certain form of spiritual autobiography to make sense of their lives. This book traces the rise and progress of conversion narrative as a unique form of spiritual autobiography in early modern England. After outlining the emergence of the genre in the seventeenth century and the revival of the form in the journals of the leaders of the Evangelical Revival, the central chapters of the book examine extensive archival sources to show the subtly different forms of narrative identity that appeared among Wesleyan Methodists, Moravians, Anglicans, Baptists, and others. Attentive to the unique voices of pastors and laypeople, women and men, Western and non-Western peoples, the book establishes the cultural conditions under which the genre proliferated.
Download or read book Autobiography and Other Writings written by Ana de San Bartolomé and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ana de San Bartolomé (1549–1626), a contemporary and close associate of St. Teresa of Ávila, typifies the curious blend of religious activism and spiritual forcefulness that characterized the first generation of Discalced, or reformed Carmelites. Known for their austerity and ethics, their convents quickly spread throughout Spain and, under Ana’s guidance, also to France and the Low Countries. Constantly embroiled in disputes with her male superiors, Ana quickly became the most vocal and visible of these mystical women and the most fearless of the guardians of the Carmelite Constitution, especially after Teresa’s death. Her autobiography, clearly inseparable from her religious vocation, expresses the tensions and conflicts that often accompanied the lives of women whose relationship to the divine endowed them with an authority at odds with the temporary powers of church and state. Last translated into English in 1916, Ana’s writings give modern readers fascinating insights into the nature of monastic life during the highly charged religious and political climate of late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Spain.
Download or read book Being For Myself Alone written by Marcus Moseley and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2005-06-13 with total page 682 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a work of unprecedented scope, tracing the origins of Jewish autobiographical writing from the early modern period to the early twentieth century. Drawing on a multitude of Hebrew and Yiddish texts, very few of which have been translated into English, and on contemporary autobiographical theory, this book provides a literary/historical explanatory paradigm for the emergence of the Jewish autobiographical voice. The book also provides the English reader with an introduction to the works of central figures in the history of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, and it includes discussion of material that has never been submitted to literary critical analysis in English.
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 195 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 Her Own Life written by Helen Wilcox and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During a period when writing was often the only form of self-expression for women, Her Own Life contains extracts from the autobiographical texts of twelve seventeenth-century women addressing a wide range of issues central to their lives.
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.
