

Hardcover
Published: 27th April 2000
ISBN: 9780521661461
Number Of Pages: 298
In this volume a team of international contributors explore the way modern conceptions of what constitutes an individual's life-story emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The Enlightenment idea of the self - an autonomous individual, testing rules imposed from without against a personal sensibility nourished from within - is today vigorously contested. By analysing early-modern 'life writing' in all its variety, from private diaries and correspondences to public confessions and philosophical portraits, this volume shows that the relation between self and community is more complex and more intimate than supposed. Spanning the period from the end of the Renaissance to the eve of Romanticism in Western Europe, a period in which the explosion of print culture afforded unprecedented opportunities for the circulation of life stories from all classes, this book examines the public assertion of self by men and women in England, France and Germany from the Renaissance to Romanticism.
"a valuable volume." Eighteenth Century Fiction
List of illustrations | p. vii |
List of contributors | p. ix |
Acknowledgments | p. xi |
Introduction: life-writing and the legitimation of the modern self | p. 1 |
Revising Descartes: on subject and community | p. 16 |
The "man of learning" defended: seventeenth-century biographies of scholars and an early modern ideal of excellence | p. 39 |
Life-writing in seventeenth-century England | p. 63 |
Representations of intimacy in the life-writing of Anne Clifford and Anne Dormer | p. 79 |
Gender, genre, and theatricality in the autobiography of Charlotte Charke | p. 97 |
Petrarch/Sade: writing the life | p. 117 |
A comic life: Diderot and le recit de vie | p. 135 |
Letters, diary, and autobiography in eighteenth-century France | p. 151 |
Portrait of the object of love in Rousseau's Confessions | p. 171 |
Fichte's road to Kant | p. 200 |
Mary Robinson and the scripts of female sexuality | p. 230 |
After Sir Joshua | p. 260 |
Index | p. 280 |
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved. |
ISBN: 9780521661461
ISBN-10: 0521661463
Audience:
Professional
Format:
Hardcover
Language:
English
Number Of Pages: 298
Published: 27th April 2000
Publisher: CAMBRIDGE UNIV PR
Country of Publication: GB
Dimensions (cm): 23.5 x 15.8
x 2.18
Weight (kg): 0.5
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