Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism

by Edited by Patrick Coleman , Jayne Lewis , Jill Kowalik

• ISBN13: 9780521101844
• ISBN10: 0521101840
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-01-08
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Revising Descartes: on subject and community

The 'man of learning' defended: seventeenth-century biographies of scholars and an early modern ideal of excellence

Life-writing in seventeenth-century England

Representations of intimacy in the life-writing of

Gender, genre and theatricality in the autobiography of Charlotte Charke

Petrarch/Sade: writing the life Julie

A comic life: Diderot and le recit de vie

Letters, diary and autobiography in eighteenth-century France

Portrait of the object of love in Rousseau's Confessions

Fichte's road to Kant

Mary Robinson and the scripts of female sexuality

After

Index

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