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Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century is a collection of essays on memoir, biography, and autobiography during a formative period for the genre. 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.
List of contents
Introduction: The Art of Writing Lives
Tanya Caldwell
Chapter 1: Dr. Johnson's Apology for the Married Life of Hester Thrale': Hester Lynch Piozzi's Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson LLD
Lisa Berglund
Chapter 2: The Education of Alexander d'Arblay: "The Idol of the World"
Peter Sabor
Chapter 3: Trying to Set the Record Straight: Alicia LeFanu, Frances Burney D'Arblay, and the Limits of Family Biography
Marilyn Francus
Chapter 4: The Life of Isabelle de Charrière: 'Written by Herself'
Victoria Warren
Chapter 5: Clashes of conversations in James Boswell's Hebrides and Life of Johnson and 'My Firm Regard to Authenticity'
James J. Caudle
Chpater 6: Charles Burney's Handel Reconsidered
Todd Gilman
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the author
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.
Summary
Offers a collection of essays on memoir, biography, and autobiography during a formative period for the genre. The essays revolve around recognised male and female figures - returning to the Boswell and Burney circle - but present arguments that dismantle traditional privileging of biographical modes.
