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Early Modern Autobiography
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 thos...
Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction
Autobiography is one of the most popular of written forms. From Casanova to Benjamin Franklin to the Kardashians, individuals throughout history have recorded their own lives and experiences. These personal writings are central to the work of literary critics, philosophers, historians and psychologists, who have found in autobiographies from across the centuries not only an understanding of the ways in which lives have been lived, but the most fundamental accounts of what it means to be a self in the world. In this Very Short Introduction Laura Marcus defines what we mean by 'autobiography', and considers its relationship with similar literary forms such as memoirs, journals, letters, diarie...
The Inner I
Although many works of autobiography exist, few works on autobiography have been written, and no single book has ever before been devoted to English literary autobiographies of the twentieth century. This incisive study of selected autobipgraphical works by British novelists, poets, and playwrights begins with "Versions of Truth," in which Finney set out to demonstrate--using among others the works of W.H. Davies, George Orwell, Joseph Conrad, and Christopher Isherwood--the extent to which autobiographical narrative, like other forms of narrative, makes heavy use of aesthetic criteria even when the writer is most concerned with giving a completely honest version of the facts. The second section, "In Search of Self," reviews the ways modern autobiographers have chosen to portray themselves ased on psychoanalytical insights peculiar to the 20th century. Employing the theories of Freud and Jung, Finney reads the autobiographies of Edmund Gosse, W.B. Yeats, H.G. Wells, Stephen Spender, and others to demonstrate the nature of the insights psychology has to offer readers and writers of 20th-century autobiography.
Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature
Early modern autobiographies and diaries provide a unique insight into women's lives and how they remembered, interpreted and represented their experiences. Sharon Seelig analyses 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-dramatising publications of Margaret Cavendish. Combining an account of the development of autobiography with close and attentive reading of the texts, Seelig explores the relation between the writers' choices of genre and form and the stories they chose to tell. She demonstrates how, in the course of the seventeenth century, women writers progressed from quite simple forms based on factual accounts to much more imaginative and persuasive acts of self-presentation. This important contribution to the fields of early modern literary studies and gender studies illuminates the interactions between literature and autobiography.
Autobiography as a Writing Strategy in Postcolonial Literature
Autobiography, a fully-recognised genre within mainstream literature today, has evolved massively in the last few decades, particularly through colonial and postcolonial texts. By using autobiography as a means of expression, many postcolonial writers were able to describe their experiences in the face of the denial of personal expression for centuries. This book is centred around the recounting and analysis of such a phenomenon. Literary purists often reject autobiography as a fully-fledged literary genre, perceiving it rather as a mere life report or a descriptive diary. The colonial and postcolonial autobiographical texts analysed in this book refute such perceptions, and demonstrate a subtle combination of literary qualities and the recounting of real-life experiences. This book demonstrates that colonial and postcolonial autobiographical texts have established their ‘literarity’. The need for postcolonial authors to express themselves through the ‘I’ and the ‘me’, as subjects and not as objects, is the essence of this book, and confirms that self-affirmation through autobiographical writing is indeed an art form.
Experiments in Life-Writing
This volume examines innovative intersections of life-writing and experimental fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries, bringing together scholars and practicing biographers from several disciplines (Modern Languages, English and Comparative Literature, Creative Writing). It covers a broad range of biographical, autobiographical, and hybrid practices in a variety of national literatures, among them many recent works: texts that test the ground between fact and fiction, that are marked by impressionist, self-reflexive and intermedial methods, by their recourse to myth, folklore, poetry, or drama as they tell a historical character’s story. Between them, the essays shed light on the broad range of auto/biographical experimentation in modern Europe and will appeal to readers with an interest in the history and politics of form in life-writing: in the ways in which departures from traditional generic paradigms are intricately linked with specific views of subjectivity, with questions of personal, communal, and national identity. The Introduction of this book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.
The Genre of Autobiography in Victorian Literature
The plots of Victorian autobiographies are highly variable in terms of developing motifs and tropes. Autobiographers undergo spiritual and mental crises, live out Romantic and biblical myths, follow historical and scientific paradigms and the dynamic patterns of their own ideas. Nevertheless, underlying this diversity are profound structural similarities in plots of self-development and the implied relationships between self and public works and ideas.
Life Writing
This volume of more than twenty essays reflects the intersections between biography, autobiography and literature. Several pieces focus upon the contentious sub-genre of literary biography, while others examine the autobiographical threads that are detachable in literary writing and a variety of other forms.
Literature by the Working Class
Viewing all of these stories together, Falke captures the richness of working-class culture, the bravery of these authors' persistence, and the fecundity of their literary imaginations. Literature by the Working Class proposes a way to read working-class autobiographies that attends to both the socio-historical influences on their composition and their value as individual literary works. Although social historians, reading historians, and historians of rhetoric have recognized the significance of working-class autobiography to the early nineteenth century, providing broad overviews of the genre, very little work has been done to read these works as literature. Part of this negligence arises for the style of these autobiographies. They reject notions of autonomous selfhood and linear self-creation that characterize other Romantic period autobiographical works.
