Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women's Lives, 1600–1680Cambridge University Press, 2006 M03 2 Early modern autobiographies and diaries provide a unique insight into women's lives and how they remembered, interpreted and represented their experiences. Sharon Seelig analyses the writings of six seventeenth-century women: diaries by Margaret Hoby and Anne Clifford, more extended narratives by Lucy Hutchinson, Ann Fanshawe, and Anne Halkett, and the extraordinarily varied and self-dramatising publications of Margaret Cavendish. Combining an account of the development of autobiography with close and attentive reading of the texts, Seelig explores the relation between the writers' choices of genre and form and the stories they chose to tell. She demonstrates how, in the course of the seventeenth century, women writers progressed from quite simple forms based on factual accounts to much more imaginative and persuasive acts of self-presentation. This important contribution to the fields of early modern literary studies and gender studies illuminates the interactions between literature and autobiography. |
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Authorial Conquests Autobiographical Writings Autobiography of Anne Biography Blazing World Bloomington California Press Cambridge University Press Chicago Press Clarendon Press Clucas Colonel Hutchinson Conscience in Seventeenth-Century Cornell University Press Cottegnies and Weitz Countess Countess of Dorset Diary of Lady Dragstra Duchess of Newcastle Early Modern England Early Modern English English Civil War English Literary Renaissance English Literature English Renaissance English Society Essays Theoretical Female Fiction Gender Genre George Harvard University Press Illinois Press Indiana University Press Ithaca John Loftis Katherine Lady Anne Clifford Lady Halkett Lady Margaret Hoby Life-Writing Literary Renaissance 24 Literature in Britain London Lucy Hutchinson Margaret Cavendish Martin's Press Memoirs of Ann Olney Oxford University Press Paul Princely Brave Woman Princeton University Press Private Conscience Richard Hooker Routledge Sara Seventeenth Seventeenth-Century England Stuart Studies Susan Theoretical and Critical Travitsky University of Chicago University of Illinois Urbana Wilcox Women in Early Women Writers Women's Autobiography Wynne-Davies York