Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism

This book examines the public assertion of self by men and women in England, France and Germany from the Renaissance to Romanticism.

Patrick Coleman (Edited by), Jayne Lewis (Edited by), Jill Kowalik (Edited by)

9780521101844, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 8 January 2009

300 pages, 14 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.44 kg

"a valuable volume." Eighteenth Century Fiction

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 centuries. The Enlightenment idea of the self - an autonomous individual, testing rules imposed from without against a personal sensibility nourished from within - is today vigourously contested. By analysing early modern 'life writing' in all its variety, from private diaries and correspondence 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.

Introduction Patrick Coleman
1. Revising Descartes: on subject and community Timothy J. Reiss
2. The 'man of learning' defended: seventeenth-century biographies of scholars and an early modern ideal of excellence Peter N. Miller
3. Life-writing in seventeenth-century England Debora Shuger
4. Representations of intimacy in the life-writing of Anne Clifford and Anne Dormer Mary O'Connor
5. Gender, genre and theatricality in the autobiography of Charlotte Charke Robert Folkenflik
6. Petrarch/Sade: writing the life Julie Candler Hayes
7. A comic life: Diderot and le recit de vie Stephen Werner
8. Letters, diary and autobiography in eighteenth-century France Benoit Melancon
9. Portrait of the object of love in Rousseau's Confessions Felicity Baker
10. Fichte's road to Kant Anthony J. La Vopa
11. Mary Robinson and the scripts of female sexuality Anne K. Mellor
12. After Sir Joshua Richard Wendorf
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]