Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism

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

Overview

A team of international contributors explores 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 vigorously contested. By analyzing 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521101844
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/08/2009
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.67(d)

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

"a valuable volume." Eighteenth Century Fiction

From the Publisher