Betraying Our Selves

Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts

NA NA

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781349628476
• Print ISBN:
  9780312231491

This is a lively study of the autobiographical instinct in a variety of 16th and 17th century modes of writing in English, from letters and memoirs to pastoral, polemic and street ballads. The book's central concern is how "selves" are "betrayed" in texts, particularly in the centuries before the autobiography was a recognized genre. It suggests that self-representation in the early modern period was often indirect, emerging in oblique and surprising ways.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Prologue: the Poet as Subject: Literary Self-conciousness in Gower's Confessio Amantis
• 2 The Construction of an Author: Pietro Aretina and the Elizabethans
• 3 The Vocacyon offohan Bale: Protestant Rhetoric and the Self
• 4 Songs, Sonnets and Autobiography: Self-representation in Sixteenth-century Verse Miscellanies
• 5 'So Much Worth': Autobiographical Narratives in the Work of Lady Mary Wroth
• 6 'Child of Time': Bacon's Uses of Self-representation
• 7 Her Own Life, Her Own Living? Text and Materiality in Seventeenth-century Englishwomen's Autobiographical Writings
• 8 The Two Pilgrimages of the Laureate of Ashover, Leonard Wheatcroft
• 9 They Only Lived Twice: Public and Private Selfhood in the Autobiographies of Anne, Lady Halkett and Colonel Joseph Bampfield
• 10 [Re]constructing the Past: the Diametric Lives of Mary Rich
• 11 Last Farewell to the World: Semi-oral Autobiography in Seventeenth-century Broadside Ballads
• 12 Slightly Different Meanings: Insanity, Language and the Self in Early Modern Autobiographical Pamphlets
• 13 Epilogue: 'Oppression Makes a Wise Man Mad': the Suffering of the Self in Autobiographical Tradition
• Index