Tom Clark

Emily Finlay

Philippa Kelly

In 1978, Nelson Goodman explored the relation of “worlds” to language and literature, formulating the term, “worldmaking” to suggest that many other worlds can as plausibly exist as the “world” we know right now. We cannot catch or know “the world” as such: all we can catch are the world versions - descriptions, views or workings of the world – that are expressed in symbolic systems (words, music, dancing, visual representations). Over the twenty-five years since then, creative works have played a crucial role in realigning, reshaping and renegotiating our understandings of how worlds can be made and preserved in the face of globalizing trends. The volume is divided into three sections, each engaging with worlds as malleable constructs. Central to all of the contributions is the question: how can we understand the relationships between natural, political, cultural, fictional, literary, linguistic and virtual worlds, and why does this matter?

Literature, language, culture

Worldmaking

Lloyd Davis

Ronald Bedford

Early Modern English Lives examines sixteenth- and seventeenth-century autobiographical practices in key contexts and modes of self-representation. Moving between diaries, letters, journals, memoirs, household and personal accounts, and major autobiographical texts, the study explores the social and historical conditions that shaped early modern life-writing. The authors argue that expressions of personal identity, along with the notion of privacy itself, involved an elaborate interplay of generic roles and cultural discourses.

Autobiography and Self-representation, 1500-1660

Early Modern English Lives

The King and I

Early Modern Autobiography considers the many ways in which autobiographical selves emerged from the late medieval period through the seventeenth century, with the aim of understanding the interaction between those individuals' lives and their worlds, the ways in which they could be recorded, and the contexts in which they are read. In addressing this historical arc, the volume develops new readings of significant autobiographical works, while also suggesting the importance of texts and contexts that have rarely been analyzed in detail, enabling the contributors to reflect on, and challenge, some prevailing ideas about what it means to write autobiographically and about the development of notions of self-representation.

Theories, Genres, Practices

Early Modern Autobiography

Stephen Greenblatt

Taking the reader back to the early modern period, this book addresses the works of Shakespeare, and asks how historical texts might be seen to interplay with identity. Beginning with Stephen Greenblatt's illuminating essay, questions are raised about how we come up with "important" historical texts, how we use educational and cultural institutions to maintain their primacy, and what the costs of this can be. Several of the essays look at ways of defining "the self" in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the working-through of these notions in various writings. Others tell us about how people traveled and the effects of travel on selfhood - how they dressed, how they celebrated special occasions, and how they thought of work and pleasure. The authors reflect on recent methodological concerns and adapt them to new issues in historically-oriented literary and cultural studies. They offer important contributions to new directions in scholarship. The book emerges from a symposium held at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, to celebrate the work of Stephen Greenblatt. Drawing on Greenblatt's methodologies, contributors examine strategies by which we "know" ourselves through our relationships with the past.

Philippa Kelly

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