Abstract
This collection of essays is an exploration of written forms of self-representation in the period before the advent of autobiography as a recognised genre,1 concentrating in particular on English texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It does not aim to be a comprehensive pre-history of autobiography, but addresses a number of crucial questions for the study of the early modern period, and for our increasing understanding of autobiographical writing. There are fundamental matters of information to be gathered: what sorts of people, for example, attempted to represent their own selves in writing in this period, and what literary forms were the most accessible or appropriate? There is a range of interpretative questions to be considered, including those of influence and motivation, and of whether the self-representation was conscious or incidental. Underlying all of these are the thorny problems implicit in the term ‘self-representation’: what exactly does literary representation entail, and with what confidence can we use the word ‘self’ with reference to early modern writers?2
None can accuse us, none can us betray,
Unless our selves, our own selves will bewray.
(Mary Wroth, Love’s Victory III.ii.25–6)
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Notes
The term ‘autobiography’ was first used in English in 1807 by Robert Southey, and the widespread recognition of autobiography as a literary genre worthy of inclusion in, for example, university curricula is a late twentieth-century phenomenon. See James Goodwin, Autobiography: The Self Made Text (New York: Twayne, 1993), and James Olney, Studies in Autobiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). However, as Sheila Ottway has demonstrated in Desiring Disencumbrance: The Representation of the Self in Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (University of Groningen PhD thesis, 1998) pp. 8–10, the practice of autobiography was certainly described in the seventeenth century, by Margaret Cavendish in 1664 and Roger North in the 1690s.
Among a number of recent discussions of these points, see The Making of Sixteenth Century Identity, ed. Amanda Piesse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997); Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997); and John Martin, ‘Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe’, American Historical Review 102.5 (1997) 1309–42, an essay which deals, among other topics, with the influential but disputed work by Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980).
Archbishop Sandys, Sermons (London, 1841) p. 395.
See, for example, Paul Delaney, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), and Margaret Bottrall, Every Man a Phoenix: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography (London: John Murray, 1958).
Peter Burke, ‘Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes’, in Rewriting the Self, op. cit., pp. 17–28; the quotation is from p. 27. The idea of Renaissance individualism originated with the publication, in 1860, of Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien [The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, translated by S.C.G. Middlemore (Oxford, 1945)].
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Dragstra, H., Ottway, S., Wilcox, H. (2000). Introduction. In: Dragstra, H., Ottway, S., Wilcox, H. (eds) Betraying Our Selves. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62847-6_1
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