Writing lives : biography and textuality, identity and representation in early modern England / [edited by] Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Sharpe, Kevin (Kevin M.)

Zwicker, Steven N.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Renaissance--Biography--History and criticism.

Renaissance.

Biography.

England--Biography--History and criticism.

England.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xii, 369 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2008.

Summary:

Biography appears to thrive as never before, and there clearly remains a broad readership for literary biography. But the methods and approaches of recent criticism which have contributed rich insights and asked new questions about the ways in which we interrogate and appreciate literature have scarcely influenced biography. Biography as a form has been largely unaffected by either new critical or historical perspectives. For early-modern scholars the biographical model, fashioned as a stable form in the eighteenth century, has been in some respects a distorting lens onto early-modern lives. In the Renaissance and early-modern period, rather than biography's organic and developmental narratives of a coherent subject, lives were written and represented in a bewildering array of textual sites and generic forms. And such lives were clearly imagined and written not to entertain or even simply to inform, but to edify and instruct, to counsel and polemicize. It is only when we understand how early moderns imagined and narrated lives, only, that is, through a full return to history and an exact historicizing, that we can newly conceive the meaning of those lives and begin to rewrite their histories free of the imperatives and teleologies of Enlightenment.

In Writing Lives literary scholars, cultural critics, and historians of ideas and visual media, currently engaged both with early modern conceptions of the life and our own conceptualizing of the biographical project, reflect on the problems of writing lives from the various perspectives of their own research and in the form of case studies informed by new questions.

Contents:

Introducing Lives / Kevin Sharpe, Steven N. Zwicker 1

Part I Lives and Borders

1 Biography and Modernity: Some Thoughts on Origins / Stella Tillyard 29

2 An Irregular Life: Not a Biography of Constantijn Huygens / Lisa Jardine 35

Part II Literatures and Lives

3 'Secrets and Lies': The Life of Edmund Spenser / Andrew Hadfield 55

4 The Early Lives of John Milton / Thomas N. Corns 75

5 Gossip and Biography / Harold Love 91

6 Considering the Ancients: Dryden and the Uses of Biography / Steven N. Zwicker 105

Part III Painting Lives

7 'Naught But Illusion'? Buckingham's Painted Selves / Alastair Bellany 127

8 Painting a Life: The Case of Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland / Julia Marciari Alexander 161

Part IV Materials and Monarchs

9 Two Queens, One Inventory: The Lives of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor / Paulina Kewes 187

10 Elizabeth on Elizabeth: Underexamined Episodes in an Overexamined Life / Leah S. Marcus 209

11 Whose Life Is It Anyway? Writing Early Modern Monarchs and the 'Life' of James II / Kevin Sharpe 233

Part V Spiritual Selves

12 'This girl hath a spirit averse from Calvin': Reading the Life, Hearing the Voice(s) / Annabel Patterson 255

13 'Alchemy and Monstrous Love': Sir Robert Moray and the Representation of Early Modern Lives / Frances Harris 275

14 Reading Clarke's Lives in Political and Polemical Context / Peter Lake 293

15 The Servant and the Grave Robber: Walton's Lives in Restoration England / Andrea Walkden 319

Part VI Towards Biography

16 Biography, Fiction, and the Emergence of 'Identity' in Eighteenth-Century Britain / Michael McKeon 339.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780199217014

0199217017

OCLC:

214305893