Biography appears to thrive as never before; and there clearly remains a broad readership for literary biography. But the methods and approaches of recent criticism which have contributed rich insights and asked new questions about the ways in which we interrogate and appreciate literature have scarcely influenced biography. Biography as a form has been largely unaffected by either new critical or historical perspectives. For early-modern scholars the biographical model, fashioned as a stable form in the eighteenth century, has been, in some respects, a distorting lens onto early-modern lives. In the Renaissance and early-modern period rather the biography's organic and developmental narratives of a coherent subject, lives were written and represented in a bewildering array of textual sites and generic forms. And such lives were clearly imagined and written not to entertain or even simply to inform, but to edify and instruct, to counsel and polemicize. It is only when we understand how early moderns imagined and narrated lives, only that is through a full return to history and an exact historicizing, that we can newly conceive the meaning of those lives and begin to rewrite their histories free of the imperatives and teleologies of Enlightenment. In Writing Lives literary scholars, cultural critics, and historians of ideas and visual media, currently engaged both with early modern conceptions of the life and our own conceptualizing of the biographical project, reflect on the problems of writing lives from the various perspectives of their own research and in the form of case studies informed by new questions.
Reviews
this volume covers much new ground and exhibits a consistent attention to conceptual and methodological issues relating to the representation of lives... A very good team has been lined up * R. C. Richardson, Literature and History *
an elegant and instructive contribution... thought-provoking * David Hawkes, Times Literary Supplement *
This book is exceptional for its range of evidence, and for the balance struck by its editors and contributors between grand explanatory narratives of generic and experiential change and the fragmentary, episodic nature of early modern biography. Its influence will be broad and enduring. * Renaissance Quarterly *
I highly recommend these exceptional essays to all readers and writers of biography or history * Journal of British Studies *
the thoughtful contributions successfully highlight the need for a more thoroughgoing reappraisal of life-writing as a subject for further enquiry * History *
Writing Lives is itself exemplary, both for the quality of its essays and for the editors' superb introduction * Huntington Library Quarterly *
Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representations in Early Modern England is a provocative collection of fifteen essays, with an excellent introduction an otherwise fine and methodologically significant volume, which should be of great interest to all students of early-modern lives * Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700 *
Writing Lives is a fascinating book, refreshingly disparate in the approaches of its individual parts, but galvanised by the characteristic breadth of vision of its editors. It will undoubtedly be widely read by early modern scholars of almost every hue, and will have a long and enduring influence. * James Daybell, English Historical Review *
Steven Zwicker and Kevin Sharpe have collaborated in editing several interdisciplinary collections. On the evidence from this one alone, it looks like quite a successful partnership. Writing Lives is designed to rethink biography from a number of different angles. The focus is not simply on biography, but rather on all aspects of the way in which 'lives' were written and read in the early modern period and could be understood in retrospect, as well as the ways in which we might conceive of 'lives' today and the particular problems inherent in writing and understanding such 'lives'. * Notes and Queries *



Book Information
ISBN 9780199698233
Author the late Kevin Sharpe
Format Paperback
Page Count 384
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 470g
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 138mm * 22mm