‘She Did but Take up Old Stories’: Generic Fluidity and Women‘s Life Writing of the Early Eighteenth Century

2014 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Joule
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Self ◽  
Autobiographical Writing ◽  
Flexible Approach ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Jane Barker ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

In this article I demonstrate the significance of a flexible approach to examining the autobiographical in early eighteenth-century womens writing. Using ‘old stories’, existing and developing narrative and literary forms, womens autobiographical writing can be discovered in places other than the more recognizable forms such as diaries and memoirs. Jane Barker and Delarivier Manley‘s works are important examples of the dynamic and creative use of cross-genre autobiographical writing. The integration of themselves in their fictional and poetic works demonstrates the potential of generic fluidity for innovative ways to express and explore the self in textual forms.

Context

2020 ◽  
pp. 122-136
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Pelli
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Working Together ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

This chapter focuses on the first stage of reform and the direct rule of the Austrian Habsburgs, from the early eighteenth century, in Lombardy. It highlights the powerful axis with an agenda of reform for Milan and Lombardy. The local nobility was at first hesitant or even hostile, and some of them remained so, but there were also individuals and groups who themselves nurtured ambitious plans for reform, and saw the attractions of service in the imperial administration. The 'Lombardian Enlightenment' was the product of the working together of these two forces. The chapter also examines the period of maximum cooperation between the imperial power and the progressive aristocracy of Milan and Lombardy in the 1760s and 1770s. Ultimately, it discusses the most progressive nobles during the time and the house of Count Pietro Verri: the self-styled Accademia dei Pugni or 'Academy of Fisticuffs.'

scholarly journals “You” Reconstructing the Past

Mnemosyne ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Christina Schoenberger
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
The Self ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Autobiographical Writing ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
The Past ◽  
Literary Research ◽  
Contemporary Life ◽  
Autobiographical Work ◽  
The Impact

Autobiographical writing has been an integral part of literary research for decades. Which innovations does contemporary life writing contribute to the narration of the past? This paper focuses on the impact of narratological characteristics on the reconstruction of memory and self in Paul Auster’s Winter Journal (2012), an innovative autobiographical work which deviates from traditional life writing in that it is written in the second person. Considering Lejeune’s and Genette’s takes on second-person autobiography, this paper examines how the narrative situation in Winter Journal shapes subjectivity and temporality. As both protagonist and observer, the narratee oscillates between a distanced state of (critical) self-reflection and intimacy. This paper argues that by « reliving » the past through a dynamic dialogue with the self and the simultaneously addressed reader, the appellative function and the predominant use of the present tense enable a telescopic encounter with the past.

Medieval Chinese Autobiographical Writing

2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-345
Author(s):  
Ying Wang
Keyword(s):  
Literary Form ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Autobiographical Writing ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Spiritual Nature ◽  
Medieval China

From the 2nd century BC, the view emerged in China that the intent of the author is crucial to a poem’s composition and understanding. Writing was seen as the manifestation of the author’s inner spiritual nature and identity. Thus all writing was to some extent autobiographical; writing about oneself had to be indirect, rather than overt or blatant. There were a number of obstacles to the development of autobiography as a genre in China. A high value was placed on humility, and writers hesitated to focus on themselves, only rarely writing in the first person. They used different names for themselves, and unlikely literary forms, such as prefaces to works, or biographies of other people, or speaking through fictional characters. There was also resistance to autobiography, because it was thought that a life or career could only be assessed when it was over. There was still a substantial amount of autobiographical writing in ancient and medieval China. This article focuses primarily on the Tang and Song periods, and on the development of the literary form of the self-written epitaph; the earlier development of the genre and its later influence are also discussed.

Iberian War Writing

2021 ◽  
pp. 93-117
Author(s):  
Matilda Greig
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Autobiographical Writing ◽  
Service Culture ◽  
The Press ◽  
Peninsular War ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Modern War ◽  
North Western

This chapter explores the roots of the modern war memoir genre. It debunks the enduring idea that in the early nineteenth century the Iberian peninsula did not produce military autobiographies, or any autobiographical writing at all, comparable to the output in north-western Europe. Making the argument for a broader definition of ‘war memoir’, it highlights the numerous ephemeral, polemical pamphlets (also known as manifiestos) written by Spanish veterans during the Peninsular War. It presents these military authors as ambitious, high-ranking career officers and shrewd guerrilla leaders, who used memoir-writing as a political tool to defend their actions on the battlefield, assert their suitability for command, and win popular support. In doing so, it emphasises the juridical and bureaucratic origins of Spanish life writing, dating back to colonial relaciones de méritos y servicios and an elite eighteenth-century service culture, as well as the shifts caused during the Peninsular War by the forced abdication of the king and the temporary declaration of freedom of the press.

‘travels of memory, imagination and fact’: Kate O'Brien's Archival Notes

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 254-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Jamison
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Late Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
Teresa Of Avila ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Autobiographical Impulse

This essay explores Kate O'Brien's attitude towards autobiographical narrative and her quest for self-articulation. It argues that the repeated abstinence from the writing of her autobiography becomes a dominant trope in much of her late-life writing, much of which currently remains unpublished and/or uncollected. By analysing O'Brien's archival material alongside her published non-fiction prose, significant insights into O'Brien's thinking on the processes of memory, as well as her somewhat pained and contradictory relationship with the self and its expression, are brought to light. O'Brien's Farewell Spain (1937), Teresa of Avila (1951), My Ireland (1962), and Presentation Parlour (1963) all establish a mode of self-articulation through the relationship of the self with place (Spain), and person (her female relations and forebears). As such, this essay argues that these texts form a series of carefully averted auto/biographies and further utilises archive theory to offer a framework through which O'Brien's autobiographical impulse can be understood. Within this theoretical paradigm, O'Brien's quest for self-articulation finally becomes a desire to capture the anticipation of memory, opposed to direct recollection, and to seek out literary forms within which to express those memories.

Narrating Travel, Narrating the Self: Considering Women‘s Travel Writing as Life Writing

2014 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoë Kinsley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Self ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Autobiographical Texts ◽  
Women's Travel ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Travel Accounts

This article considers the ways in which eighteenth-century womens travel narratives function as autobiographical texts, examining the process by which a travellers dislocation from home can enable exploration of the self through the observation and description of place. It also, however, highlights the complexity of the relationship between two forms of writing which a contemporary readership viewed as in many ways distinctly different. The travel accounts considered, composed (at least initially) in manuscript form, in many ways contest the assumption that manuscript travelogues will somehow be more self-revelatory than printed accounts. Focusing upon the travel writing of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Katherine Plymley, Caroline Lybbe Powys and Dorothy Richardson, the article argues for a more historically nuanced approach to the reading of womens travel writing and demonstrates that the narration of travel does not always equate to a desired or successful narration of the self.

Identity over Time in Paradise Lost

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-57
Author(s):  
Ayelet Langer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
The Self ◽  
Clear Distinction ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Way

This essay proposes that in Paradise Lost Milton represents the conscious self as constructed over time, thereby anticipating the early eighteenth- century formulation of identity as a problem of diachronic identity. Milton represents this process of self-constitution by situating the mind’s act of unifying itself in the present moment, which he models on Aristotle’s definition of the now as both a connection and a boundary of time. Aristotle’s bivalency of the now serves in Paradise Lost to distinguish between the capacity of prelapsarian and postlapsarian individuals to constitute their self by organizing their experiences in time. As a connection of time, the Aristotelian now grounds Milton’s representation of the way in which the prelapsarian individual constitutes his or her own self. As a boundary of time, it marks the failure of the postlapsarian mind to achieve such constitution, which leads to a disintegration of the self. Thus, Aristotle’s distinction between the two contrasting aspects of the now becomes, in Milton’s representation of the self, the prism through which Milton forms a clear distinction between two fundamental structures of identity, fallen and unfallen.

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