Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism

by Edited by Patrick Coleman , Jayne Lewis , Jill Kowalik

• ISBN13: 9780521661461
• ISBN10: 0521661463
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-06-05
• 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

List of illustrations	vii
List of contributors	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction: life-writing and the legitimation of the modern self	1	(15)
Patrick Coleman
Revising Descartes: on subject and community	16	(23)
Timothy J. Reiss
The ``man of learning'' defended: seventeenth-century biographies of scholars and an early modern ideal of excellence	39	(24)
Peter N. Miller
Life-writing in seventeenth-century England	63	(16)
Debora Shuger
Representations of intimacy in the life-writing of Anne Clifford and Anne Dormer	79	(18)
Mary O'Connor
Gender, genre, and theatricality in the autobiography of Charlotte Charke	97	(20)
Robert Folkenflik
Petrarch/Sade: writing the life	117	(18)
Julie Candler Hayes
A comic life: Diderot and le recit de vie	135	(16)
Stephen Werner
Letters, diary, and autobiography in eighteenth-century France	151	(20)
Benoit Melancon
Portrait of the object of love in Rousseau's Confessions	171	(29)
Felicity Baker
Fichte's road to Kant	200	(30)
Anthony J. La Vopa
Mary Robinson and the scripts of female sexuality	230	(30)
Anne K. Mellor
After Sir Joshua	260	(20)
Richard Wendorf
Index	280