Tudor autobiography : listening for inwardness / Meredith Anne Skura.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Skura, Meredith Anne, 1944-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Authors, English--Early modern, 1500-1700--Biography--History and criticism.

Authors, English.

English prose literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

English prose literature.

Autobiography.

Self in literature.

Identity (Psychology) in literature.

Biography as a literary form.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (314 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Histories of autobiography in England often assume the genre hardly existed before 1600. But Tudor Autobiography investigates 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 "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.

Contents:

Autobiography : what is it? : issues and debates

Lyric autobiography : intentional or conventional fallacy? : the poetry of John Skelton (1460-1529) and Thomas Wyatt (1503-42)

Identity in autobiography and Protestant identification with saints : John Bale and St. Paul in The vocacyon of Johan Bale (1553)

Autobiography : history or fiction? : William Baldwin writing history "under the shadow of dreames and visions" in A mirror for magistrates (1559)

Sharing secrets "entombed in your heart" : Thomas Whythorne's "good friend" and the story of his life (ca. 1569-76)

Adding an "author's life" : Thomas Tusser's revisions of A hundredth good points of husbandry (1557-73)

A garden of one's own : Isabella Whitney's revision of (Hugh) Plat's Floures of philosophie in her Sweet nosegay (1573)

Erasing an author's life : George Gascoigne's revision of One hundredth sundrie flowres (1573) in his Poesies (1575)

Autobiography in the third person : Robert Greene's fiction and his autobiography by Henry Chettle (1590-92)

Autobiographers : who were they? why did they write?

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 233-283) and index.

ISBN:

9786612537981

9781282537989

1282537989

9780226761886

0226761886

OCLC:

593240140