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Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness

Online ISBN:
9780226761886
Print ISBN:
9780226761879
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness

Meredith Anne Skura
Meredith Anne Skura
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Published online:
21 February 2013
Published in print:
15 September 2008
Online ISBN:
9780226761886
Print ISBN:
9780226761879
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

Histories of autobiography in England often assume the genre hardly existed before 1600. But this book 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 the author of this book, writers reveal themselves not only by what they say, but by how they say it. Borrowing methods from affective linguistics, narratology, and psychoanalysis, she 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, the book instead asks what authors said about themselves, who wrote about themselves, how, and why. The result is a glimpse into a range of lived and imagined experience that challenges assumptions about life and autobiography in the early modern period.

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