Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century

Tanya Caldwell (Ed.)

2020
250 pages
$37.95
ISBN 9781684482269
Aperçus

Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century is a collection of essays on memoir, biography, and autobiography during a formative period for the genre. The essays revolve around recognized male and female figures - returning to the Boswell and Burney circle - but present arguments that dismantle traditional privileging of biographical modes. The contributors reconsider the processes of hero making in the beginning phases of a culture of celebrity. Employing the methodology William Godwin outlined for novelists of taking material "from all sources, experience, report, and the records of human affairs," each contributor examines within the contexts of their time and historical traditions the anxieties and imperatives of the auto/biographer as she or he shapes material into a legacy. New work on Frances Burney D'Arblay's son, Alexander, as revealed through letters; on Isabelle de Charriere; on Hester Thrale Piozzi; and on Alicia LeFanu and Frances Burney's realignment of family biography extend current conversations about eighteenth century biography and autobiography.

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Reviews

"Caldwell's edited collection thus offers invaluable models for the analysis of life-writing in its various modes, even beyond the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century subjects included. The stellar essays provide useful strategies for reading various genres even being written today beyond the typical life-writing forms of biography and autobiography."
- Eighteenth-Century Studies, Spring 2023

"Rich and thought-provoking ... offers fresh perspectives on figures at the centre of studies of eighteenth-century life writing, including James Boswell and Frances Burney, and engages them in a fascinating dialogue with less prominent writers, such as Isabelle de Charrière and Alicia LeFanu. The essays are deeply knowledgeable, elegantly written, and pose important questions for studies of the genre. Collectively, they will be of significant value to scholars of eighteenth-century literature and life writing."
- Amy Culley, author of British Women's Life Writing, 1760-1840: Friendship, Community, and Collaboration

"[O]ffers a rich and expansive collection of essays by accomplished scholars, demonstrating how underserved the topic of life writing has been in the field that, arguably, invented its modern form."
- Laura Rosenthal, author of Nightwalkers: Prostitute Narratives from the Eighteenth Century

About the editor:

Tanya Caldwell is a professor of English at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She is the author of Time to Begin Anew: Dryden's Georgics and Aeneis (Bucknell University Press) and Virgil Made English: The Decline of Classical Authority, and editor of Popular Plays by Women in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century. She is working on a biography of Hannah Cowley.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $150.00, 9781684482276; PDF: $37.95, 9781684482306; EPUB: $37.95, 9781684482283