A History of English Autobiography

This History explores the genealogy of autobiographical writing in England from the medieval period to the digital era.

Adam Smyth (Edited by)

9781107078413, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 April 2016

432 pages
23.5 x 16 x 3 cm, 0.75 kg

'Carefully argued, compelling, and ambitious, A History of English Autobiography extends the current revisionist approach to autobiography initiated by Patricia Meyer Spacks, Mary Poovey, Paul De Man, and Philippe Lejeune. Its interrogation of the genre and its rich range of rhetorical forms prove consistently illuminating. In sum, the collection advances the formal study of the self's written rendering.' Katherine Kickel, The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats

A History of English Autobiography explores the genealogy of autobiographical writing in England from the medieval period to the digital era. Beginning with an extensive introduction that charts important theoretical contributions to the field, this History includes wide-ranging essays that illuminate the legacy of English autobiography. Organized thematically, these essays survey the multilayered writings of such diverse authors as Chaucer, Bunyan, Carlyle, Newman, Wilde and Woolf. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History is the definitive, single-volume collection on English autobiography and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.

1. Introduction: the range, limits and potentials of the form Adam Smyth
2. Medieval life-writing: types, encomia, exemplars, patterns Barry Windeatt
3. Autobiographical selves in the poetry of Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and Lydgate David Matthew
4. The radicalism of early modern spiritual autobiography Molly Murray
5. Inscribing the early modern self: the materiality of autobiography Kathleen Lynch
6. Writing and revolution: civil war lives Suzanne Trill
7. Money, accounting and life-writing, 1600–1700: balancing a life Adam Smyth
8. Structures and processes of English spiritual autobiography from Bunyan to Cowper Tessa Whitehouse
9. 'Written by herself': British women's autobiography in the eighteenth century Robert Folkenflik
10. The lives of things: objects, it-narratives and fictional autobiography, 1700–1800 Lynn Festa
11. Empiricist philosophers and eighteenth-century autobiography John Richetti
12. Working-class autobiography in the nineteenth century David Vincent
13. Romantic life-writing Duncan Wu
14. Nineteenth-century spiritual autobiography: Carlyle, Mill, Newman Richard Hughes Gibson and Timothy Larsen
15. Emerging selves: the autobiographical impulse in Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Annie Wood Besant Carol Hanbery MacKay
16. Victorian artists' autobiographies: transgression, res gestae and the collective life Julie Codell
17. Victorian print culture: periodicals and serial lives, 1830–60 Stephen Colclough
18. 'Fusions and interrelations': family members of Henry James, Edmund Gosse and others Max Saunders
19. Queer lives: Wilde, Stein, Sackville-West, Woolf, Doolittle Georgia Johnston
20. Anecdotal remembrance: forms of First and Second World War life-writing Hope Wolf
21. Experiments in form: modernism and autobiography in Woolf, Eliot, Mansfield, Lawrence, Joyce and Dorothy Richardson Laura Marcus
22. Psychoanalysis and autobiography Maud Ellman
23. Poetry and autobiography in the 1930s: Auden, Isherwood, MacNeice, Spender Michael O'Neill
24. Documenting lives: mass observation, women's diaries and everyday modernity Nick Hubble
25. Postcolonial autobiography in English: the example of Trinidad Bart Moore-Gilbert
26. Around 2000: memoir as literature Joseph Brooker
27. Illness narratives Neil Vickers
28. Breaking the pact: contemporary autobiographical diversions Roger Luckhurst
29. The machines that write us: social media and the evolution of the autobiographical impulse Andreas Kitzmann.

Subject Areas: Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: general [DSB]