I. INTRODUCTORY: LIFE-WRITING BEFORE THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

1931 ◽  
pp. 1-61
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Life Writing

Dissenting Print Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tessa Whitehouse
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Sense Of Community ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Commercial Publishing

Print culture was expanding rapidly in the eighteenth century. Yet religious literature remained the largest category of printed book and Dissenters were significant contributors to this genre. From 1695 pre-publication censorship disappeared within England so print was an important mechanism through which Dissenting identity was created and sustained. Religious works could be doctrinal, controversial, or practical and it was the latter category that had the largest lay readership. Material related to Scripture, either translated or paraphrased, accounted for much of the printed religious output but life writing and poetry were also influential. Many of the authors were ministerial and male, although the audiences for which they were writing were more varied. While it is easier to trace the uses to which material designed to educate ministers was put, there were also significant examples of Dissenters using print to fashion a wider sense of community, often through the use of non-commercial publishing models.

Recording the History of Secret Thoughts in Early Modern France

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Warren Boutcher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Early Modern France ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Modern France ◽  
History Of ◽  
Personal Registers

Chapter 2.5 begins with Pierre Huet’s early eighteenth-century description of the school of Montaigne, which he says has been flourishing for more than a century. He denounces the Essais as ‘the breviary of urbane loafers and ignorant pseudointellectuals’, of undisciplined, over-free literates who do not want to pursue proper scholarship and knowledge. The chapter goes on to offer two further case-studies of the life-writing of such free literates in early modern France (Jean Maillefer and Pierre de L’Estoile), as well as a coda on Pierre Coste and John Locke. Both read Montaigne’s work while writing manuscript journals to domestic and private ends; both combined reading and writing in books with the keeping and reviewing of personal records. L’Estoile reveals the significance of Montaigne’s references to the Essais as a registre––both institutional and personal registers were ubiquitous in this period.

scholarly journals FINIS: Objects of the End of Time, Afterlife Writing and Situation of Graves

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. LW&D313-LW&D343
Author(s):  
Jane Wildgoose
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Graphic Work ◽  
Final Work

Focusing on Hogarth’s last graphic work, The Bathos, this essay examines the ways in which the vanitas themes it represents are bound up with events that occurred towards the end of the artist’s life. Drawing on life writing (including elements of Hogarth’s autobiographical notes) that accompanied the cataloguing of his works in the years following his death, it discusses a number of controversies that drew scathing criticism of his work, his character, his politics, his ideas about English art and his standing as an artist, during his final years. Focusing on textual and visual images employed by Hogarth’s detractors to belittle him, it explores how these metaphors may be connected with the iconography he employed in The Bathos, and the extent to which the work may be ‘read’ as a representation of the artist himself, and his view of his reputation at the end of his career. Contrasting the pessimistic image Hogarth presents in his final work with the afterlife writing of his achievements by his contemporaries, it concludes with reflection on the role that his grave continues to play in celebrating his life and his status as one of the most talented and innovative artists of the eighteenth century.

News, Biography, and Eighteenth-Century Celebrity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Cowan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
News Writing ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Key Aspects

Celebrity was not invented in the eighteenth century, but it was transformed by the new publics, and the new media that emerged to cultivate and maintain these publics, from the mid-seventeenth until the later eighteenth centuries. Celebrity is therefore best understood as a certain kind of fame rather than a phase in the history of fame. Contemporaneity, publicity, and personality are key aspects of the kind of fame one may identify as celebrity. This chapter argues that attention to genre in the process of celebrity formation makes it possible to distinguish between regimes of fame as constituted by the media available and the ways in which public personalities were variously constructed. Two genres were particularly influential in shaping the development of the new celebrity of the long eighteenth century: news writing and life writing. The contributions of news and biography to eighteenth-century conceptions of celebrity are explored in detail.

‘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.

Ancient Biography in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

2020 ◽  
pp. 574-585
Author(s):  
Enrica Zanin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Parallel Lives ◽  
Historical Reliability ◽  
Philosophical Biography

This chapter examines presences of ancient biography in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The popularity of biography in seventeenth-century Europe was mainly due to the numerous translations of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. Conversely, Suetonius, whose Lives of the Caesars were extremely influential in the early modern period, was less read in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Meanwhile, Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers contributed to the rise of literary and philosophical biography. However, the more life-writing is considered as a literary practice, the less its historical reliability is valued. If, in the seventeenth century, Lives were generally regarded as a historical genre, eighteenth-century philosophers criticized the historical interest of biography, at a time in which history began to be studied as a science more than as a pedagogical device.

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