Tudor Autobiography
Listening for Inwardness
Tudor Autobiography
Listening for Inwardness
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 “the early modern self” in life writing, Tudor Autobiography instead 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.
272 pages | 11 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2008
Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature
Reviews
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
1 Autobiography—What Is It?
Issues and Debates
2 Lyric Autobiography: Intentional or Conventional Fallacy?
The Poetry of John Skelton (1460–1529) and Thomas Wyatt (1503–42)
3 Identity in Autobiography and Protestant Identification with Saints
John Bale and St. Paul in The Vocacyon of John Bale (1553)
4 Autobiography: History or Fiction?
William Baldwin Writing History “under the Shadow of Dream and Vision” in A Mirror for Magistrates (1559)
5 Sharing Secrets “Entombed in Your Heart”
Thomas Whythorne’s “Good Friend” and the Story of His Life (ca. 1569–76)
6 Adding an “Author’s Life”
Thomas Tusser’s Revisions of A Hundreth Good Points of Husbandry (1557–
73)
7 A Garden of One’s Own
Isabella Whitney’s Revision of Hugh Plat’s Floures of Philosophie in Her Sweet Nosegay (1573)
8 Erasing an Author’s Life
George Gascoigne’s Revision of One Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573) in His
Poesies (1575)
9 Autobiography in the Third Person
Robert Greene’s Fiction and His Autobiography by Henry Chettle (1590–92)
10 Autobiographers: Who Were They? Why Did They Write?
Appendix
Notes
IndexBe the first to know
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