Representations Of The Self From The Renaissance To Romanticism

This book examines the public assertion of self by men and women in England, France and Germany from the Renaissance to Romanticism.

Gregory S. Brown's A Field of Honor: The Identities of Writers, Court Culture and Public Theater in the French Intellectual Field from Racine to the Revolution offers a multilevel study of the intellectual, social, and institutional contexts of dramatic authorship and the world of playwrights in 18th-century Paris. Brown deftly interweaves research in archival and printed materials, case studies of individual authorial strategies, the rich, often contentious historiography on the French Enlightenment and contemporary cultural theory and criticism. Drawing on a sophisticated array of recent studies, Brown positions his work against and between the grain of alternative approaches and interpretations. He combines scholarship on the history of the book with analyses of political culture and cultural identity, leaving the reader with a strong and revealing appreciation for the tensions and crosscurrents staged at the center of the 18th-century "republic of letters."

How did early modern English people write about themselves, and how do we listen to their voices four centuries later? The authors of Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation 1500-1660 argue that identity is depicted through complex, subtle, and often contradictory social interactions and literary forms. Diaries, letters, daily spiritual reckonings, household journals, travel journals, accounts of warfare, incidental meditations on the nature of time, death and self-reflection, as well as life stories themselves: these are just some of the texts that allow us to address the social and historical conditions that influenced early modern self-writing. The texts explored in Early Modern English Lives do not automatically speak to our familiar patterns of introspection and self-inquiry. Often formal, highly metaphorical and emotionally restrained, they are very different in both tone and purpose from the autobiographies that crowd bookshelves today. Does the lack of emotional description suggest that complex emotions themselves, in all the depth and variety that we now understand (and expect of) them, are a relatively modern phenomenon? This is one of the questions addressed by Early Modern English Lives. The authors bring to our attention the kinds of rhetorical and generic features of early modern self-representation that can help us to appreciate people living four hundred years ago as the complicated, composite figures they were: people whose expression of identity involved an elaborate interplay of roles and discourses, and for whom the notion of privacy itself was a wholly different phenomenon.

An investigation into the various ways in which Renaissance writers comment on, present, and defend their own works, and at the same time themselves in Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, and the Dutch Republic.

First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Spanish colonial period in South America saw artists develop the subgenre of official portraiture, or portraits of key individuals in the continent’s viceregal governments. Although these portraits appeared to illustrate a narrative of imperial splendor and absolutist governance, they instead became a visual record of the local history that emerged during the colonial occupation. Using the official portrait collections accumulated between 1542 and 1830 in Lima, Buenos Aires, and Bogotá as a lens, Pictured Politics explores how official portraiture originated and evolved to become an essential component in the construction of Ibero-American political relationships. Through the surviving portraits and archival evidence—including political treatises, travel accounts, and early periodicals—Emily Engel demonstrates that these official portraits not only belie a singular interpretation as tools of imperial domination but also visualize the continent's multilayered history of colonial occupation. The first stand alone analysis of South American portraiture, Pictured Politics brings to light the historical relevance of political portraits in crafting the history of South American colonialism.

This book gives answers to questions surrounding the rise of autobiographical writing from the sixteenth to the twentieth century by analyzing texts varying from the time of the Spanish Inquisi tion to post-war Japan.

Dynamics of Neo-Latin and the Vernacular offers a collection of studies that deal with the cultural exchange between Neo-Latin and the vernacular, and with the very cultural mobility that allowed for the successful development of Renaissance bilingual culture. Studying a variety of multilingual issues of language and poetics, of translation and transfer, its authors interpret Renaissance cross-cultural contact as a radically dynamic, ever-shifting process of making cultural meaning. With renewed attention for suitable theoretical and methodological frames of reference, Dynamics of Neo-Latin and the Vernacular firmly resists literary history’s temptation to pin down the Early Modern relationship between languages, literatures and cultures, in favour of stressing the sheer variety and variability of that relationship itself. Contributors are Jan Bloemendal, Ingrid De Smet, Annet den Haan, Tom Deneire, Beate Hintzen, David Kromhout, Bettina Noak, Ingrid Rowland, Johanna Svensson, Harm-Jan van Dam, Guillaume van Gemert, Eva van Hooijdonk, and Ümmü Yüksel.