Tudor Autobiography

by Skura, Meredith Anne

• ISBN13: 9780226761879
• ISBN10: 0226761878
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-09-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Histories of autobiography in England often assume the genre hardly existed before 1600. ButTudor Autobiographyinvestigates eleven sixteenth-century English writers who used sermons, a saint's biography, courtly and popular verse, a traveler's report, a history book, a husbandry book, and a supposedly fictional adventure novel to share the secrets of the heart and tell their life stories. In the past such texts have not been called autobiographies because they do not reveal much of the inwardness of their subject, a requisite of most modern autobiographies. But, according to Meredith Anne Skura, writers reveal themselves not only by what they say but by how they say it. Borrowing methods from affective linguistics, narratology, and psychoanalysis, Skura shows that a writer's thoughts and feelings can be traced in his or her language. Rejecting the search for "theearly modern self" in life writing,Tudor Autobiographyinstead asks what authors said about themselves, who wrote about themselves, how, and why. The result is a fascinating glimpse into a range of lived and imagined experience that challenges assumptions about life and autobiography in the early modern period.

Author Biography

Meredith Anne Skura is the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English at Rice University and author of The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process and Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Autobiography-What Is It?: Issues and Debates	p. 1
Lyric Autobiography: Intentional or Conventional Fallacy?: The Poetry of John Skelton (1460-1529) and Thomas Wyatt (1503-42)	p. 19
Identity in Autobiography and Protestant Identification with Saints: John Bale and St. Paul in The Vocacyon of Johan Bale (1553)	p. 49
Autobiography: History or Fiction?: William Baldwin Writing History "under the Shadow of Dreames and Visions" in A Mirror for Magistrates (1559)	p. 73
Sharing Secrets "Entombed in Your Heart": Thomas Whythorne's "Good Friend" and the Story of His Life (ca. 1569-76)	p. 98
Adding an "Author's Life": Thomas Tusser's Revisions of A Hundreth Good Points of Husbandry (1557-73)	p. 126
A Garden of One's Own: Isabella Whitney's Revision of [Hugh] Plat's Floures of Philosophie in Her Sweet Nosegay (1573)	p. 149
Erasing an Author's Life: George Gascoigne's Revision of One Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573) in His Poesies (1575)	p. 168
Autobiography in the Third Person: Robert Greene's Fiction and His Autobiography by Henry Chettle (1590-92)	p. 197
Autobiographers: Who Were They? Why Did They Write?	p. 220
The Portraits	p. 229
Notes	p. 233
Index	p. 285
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