Overview

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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9783030423292

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Reviews

“Miriam Nandi’s Reading the Early Modern English Diary offers an interesting psychoanalytic and historical reading of early modern English diaries by Margaret Hoby, Anne Clifford, Ralph Josselin, and Samuel Pepys. … This is still a rewarding study, though. Nandi’s book is written in a crisp, interesting style, often with felicitous distinctions, and with clear argumentation throughout. … Nandi illuminates the early modern diary, and her analytical work is richly suggestive and worth the reading.” (Elizabeth Hodgson, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 75 (4), 2022)

Miriam Nandi's Reading the Early Modern English Diary offers an interesting psychoanalytic and historical reading of early modern English diaries by Margaret Hoby, Anne Clifford, Ralph Josselin, and Samuel Pepys. ... This is still a rewarding study, though. Nandi's book is written in a crisp, interesting style, often with felicitous distinctions, and with clear argumentation throughout. ... Nandi illuminates the early modern diary, and her analytical work is richly suggestive and worth the reading. (Elizabeth Hodgson, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 75 (4), 2022)

Author Information

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.

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