Writing Lives
In this book leading literary scholars, cultural critics, and historians of ideas and visual media, currently engaged both with early modern and contemporary conceptions of biography, 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.
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Writing Lives argues that the modern biographical model has in many respects distorted early modern lives which rather than organic and developmental narratives of a coherent subject were written and represented in a vast array of textual sites and generic forms. Such lives were imagined and written not to entertain or even simply to inform, but to edify, instruct, and counsel. By applying new critical questions and perspectives, most of all by returning to history and interrogating how early moderns imagined and narrated lives, these essays enable us newly to conceive the meaning of those lives and begin to rewrite their histories free of the imperatives and teleologies of Enlightenment.
