Author: Effie Botonaki
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
The early modern period saw the emergence and proliferation of diaries and autobiographies written by both men and women. Although autobiographical texts have been written before that time, the late sixteenth and especially the seventeenth centuries was the first time that so many diaries and autobiographies were produced.
Author: Helen Wilcox
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134979266
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
During a period when writing was often the only form of self-expression for women, Her Own Life contains extracts from the autobiographical texts of twelve seventeenth-century women addressing a wide range of issues central to their lives.
Author: Paul Delany
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131737620X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
Originally published in 1969. In the seventeenth century neither the literary genre nor the term ‘autobiography’ existed but we see in seventeenth-century literature many kinds of autobiographical writings, to which their authors gave such titles as ‘Journal of the Life of Me, Confessions, etc. This work is a study of nearly two hundred of these, published and unpublished, which together represent a very varied group of writings. The book begins with an examination of the rise of autobiography as a genre during the Renaissance. It discusses seventeenth-century autobiographical writings under two main headings – ‘religious’, where the autobiographies are grouped according to the denomination of their writer, and ‘secular’, where a wide variety of writings is examined, including accounts of travel and of military and political life, as well as more personal accounts. Autobiographies by women are treated separately, and the author shows that they in general have a deeper revelation of sentiments and more subtle self-analyses than is found in comparable works by men. Sources and influences are recorded and also the essential historical details of each work. This book gives a critical analysis of the autobiographies as literary works and suggests relationships between them and the culture and society of their time. Review of the original publication: "...a contribution to cultural history which is of quite exceptional merit. Its subject is of great intrinsic interest and manifest importance and Professor Delany has treated it with exemplary thoroughness, lucidity, and intelligence." Lionel Trilling
Author: Carme Font
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317231384
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 415
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Book Description
This study examines women’s prophetic writings in seventeenth-century Britain as the literary outcome of a discourse of social transformation that integrates religious conscience, political participation, and gender identity. The following pages approach prophecy as a culture, a language, and a catalyst for collective change as the individual prophet conceptualized it. While the corpus of prophetic writing continues to grow as the result of archival research, this monograph complements our particular knowledge of women’s prophecy in the seventeenth century with a global assessment of what makes speech prophetic in the first place, and what are the differences and similarities between texts that fall into the prophetic mode. These disparities and commonalities stand out in the radical language of prophecy as well as in the way it creates an authorial centre. Examining how authorship is represented in several configurations of prophetic delivery, such as essays on prophecy, poetic prophecy, spiritual autobiography, and election narratives, the different chapters consider why prophecy peaked in the years of the civil wars and how it evolved towards the eighteenth century. The analyses extrapolate the peculiarities of each case study as being representative of a form of textually-based activism that enabled women to gain a deeper understanding of themselves as creators of independent meaning that empowered them as individuals, citizens, and believers.
Author: Katharine Hodgkin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351871579
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
A fascinating case study of the complex psychic relationship between religion and madness in early seventeenth-century England, the narrative presented here is a rare, detailed autobiographical account of one woman's experience of mental disorder. The writer, Dionys Fitzherbert, recounts the course of her affliction and recovery and describes various delusions and confusions, concerned with (among other things) her family and her place within it; her relation to religion; and the status of the body, death and immortality. Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England presents in modern typography an annotated edition of the author's manuscript of this unusual and compelling text. Also included are prefaces to the narrative written by Fitzherbert and others, and letters written shortly after her mental crisis, which develop her account of the episode. The edition will also give a modernized version of the original text. Katharine Hodgkin supplies a substantial introduction that places this autobiography in the context of current scholarship on early modern women, addressing the overarching issues in the field that this text touches upon. In an appendix to the volume, Hodgkin compares the two versions of the text, considering the grounds for the occasional exclusion or substitution of specific words or passages. Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England adds an important new dimension to the field of early modern women studies.
Author: Phyllis Mack
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520915589
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496
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Book Description
This study of radical prophecy in 17th-century England explores the significance of gender for religious visionaries between 1650 and 1700. Phyllis Mack focuses on the Society of Friends, or Quakers, the largest radical sectarian group active during the English Civil War and Interregnum. The meeting records, correspondence, almanacs, autobiographical and religious writings left by the early Quakers enable Mack to present a textured portrait of their evolving spirituality. Parallel sources on men and women provide a unique opportunity to pose theoretical questions about the meaning of gender, such as whether a "women's spirituality" can be identified, or whether religious women are more or less emotional than men.
Author: Patricia Demers
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 144265810X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
In this introduction to the diversity and scope of the writing by women in England from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Patricia Demers discusses the creative realities of women writers' accomplishments and the cultural conditions under which they wrote. There were deep suspicions and restrictions surrounding the education of women during this period, and thus the contributions of women to literature, and to the print industry itself, are largely unknown. This wide-ranging examination of the genres of early modern women's writing embraces translation (from Latin, Greek, and French) in the fields of theological discourse, romance and classical tragedy, original meditations and prayers, letters and diaries, poetry, closet drama, advice manuals, and prophecies and polemics. A close study of six major authors – Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Tanfield Cary, Lady Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, and Katherine Philips – explores their work as poets, dramatists, and romantic fiction writers. Demers invites readers to savour the subtlety and daring with which these women authors made writing an expressly social craft.
Author: David Booy
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040290108
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
While writings by early modern Quaker women have been discussed and quoted fairly extensively, relatively few of their texts are readily or widely available. The chief purpose of this edition is to rectify this state of affairs in one central area - that of autobiographical writing. The edition contains substantial excerpts from a range of self-writings by Quaker women, composed between the 1650s and circa 1710: letters, testimonies, memoirs, accounts of spiritual development, narratives of persecution and imprisonment. Six of the texts have been freshly edited from manuscripts (including Mary Penington's A Brief Account); the others have been transcribed from the first printed editions. In his general introduction to the volume, the editor sketches the history of the Quaker movement from the 1650s to the early 1700s, and considers the role of female Quakers during the first and second phases of the movement. The introduction also surveys the types and purposes of autobiographical writings produced by female Friends, and relates these writings to key Quaker ideas, concerns and practices regarding the inner light, scripture, testimony, plain speaking, friendship, gender and community. Booy indicates the wider context of the development of autobiographical writing during the seventeenth century, and discusses briefly issues to do with the construction of the self in writing. Each text is prefaced by a substantial headnote providing biographical and historical information. Footnotes supply biblical and other references, and gloss unfamiliar or specialist vocabulary. The volume includes a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary materials. The edition is aimed at all those interested in the history of the Quakers, whether they be scholars in the fields of religious, cultural and women's studies, or of history and literature generally.
Author: M. Suzuki
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230305504
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
During the seventeenth century, in response to political and social upheavals such as the English Civil Wars, women produced writings in both manuscript and print. This volume represents recent scholarship that has uncovered new texts as well as introduced new paradigms to further our understanding of women's literary history during this period.
Author: Michelle M. Dowd
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317129377
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 195
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Book Description
By taking account of the ways in which early modern women made use of formal and generic structures to constitute themselves in writing, the essays collected here interrogate the discursive contours of gendered identity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The contributors explore how generic choice, mixture, and revision influence narrative constructions of the female self in early modern England. Collectively they situate women's life writings within the broader textual culture of early modern England while maintaining a focus on the particular rhetorical devices and narrative structures that comprise individual texts. Reconsidering women's life writing in light of recent critical trends-most notably historical formalism-this volume produces both new readings of early modern texts (such as Margaret Cavendish's autobiography and the diary of Anne Clifford) and a new understanding of the complex relationships between literary forms and early modern women's 'selves'. This volume engages with new critical methods to make innovative connections between canonical and non-canonical writing; in so doing, it helps to shape the future of scholarship on early modern women.
