Overview
- Combines formalist, genre-oriented analyses with historically-informed psychoanalytic models to develop new approaches in diary criticism
- Sheds light on a range of questions in early modern studies, from writing practices to practical theology, to women’s writing and the construction of selfhood or inwardness
- Analyses the “narrative identity” that is constructed in diaries from new angles that address the fragmented character of the texts into account
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Reading the Early Modern Diary traces the historical genealogy, formal characteristics, and shifting cultural uses of the early modern English diary. It explores the possibilities and limitations the genre held for the self-expression of a writer at a time which considerably pre-dated the Romantic cult of the individual self. The book analyzes the connections between genre and self-articulation: How could the diary come to be associated with emotional self-expression given the tedium and repetitiveness of its early seventeenth-century ancestors? How did what were once mere lists of daily events evolve into narrative representations of inner emotions? What did it mean to write on a daily basis, when the proper use of time was a heavily contested issue? Reading the Early Modern Diary addresses these questions and develops new theoretical frameworks for discussing interiority and affect in early modern autobiographical texts.
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Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Miriam Nandi is Professor of English Literature at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Her research interests include literary theory, early modern autobiographical writing, and postcolonial literature. She is the author of M/Other India/s (2007) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2009) and has co-edited Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature, with Monika Fludernik (2014) and MatteReality: Historical Trajectories and Conceptual Futures in Material Culture Studies, with Ingrid Gessner and Juliane Schwarz-Bierschenk, (2019). Recent publications include work on cultural memory studies and early modern diaries.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Reading the Early Modern English Diary
Authors: Miriam Nandi
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42327-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-42326-1Published: 28 February 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-42329-2Published: 01 March 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-42327-8Published: 27 February 2021
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VII, 197
Topics: Early Modern/Renaissance Literature, History of Early Modern Europe, Literary History, British and Irish Literature, British Culture, European Culture