A team of international contributors explores the way modern conceptions of what constitutes an individual's life story emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Enlightenment idea of the self--an autonomous individual, testing rules imposed from without against a personal sensibility nourished from within--is today vigorously contested. By analyzing early-modern "life writing" in all its variety, from private diaries and correspondences to public confessions and philosophical portraits, this volume shows that the relation between self and community is more complex and more intimate than supposed.

In this volume a team of international contributors explore the way modern conceptions of what constitutes an individual's life-story emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Enlightenment idea of the self - an autonomous individual, testing rules imposed from without against a personal sensibility nourished from within - is today vigourously contested. By analysing early modern 'life writing' in all its variety, from private diaries and correspondence to public confessions and philosophical portraits, this volume shows that the relation between self and community is more complex and more intimate than supposed. Spanning the period from the end of the Renaissance to the eve of Romanticism in western Europe, a period in which the explosion of print culture afforded unprecedented opportunities for the circulation of life-stories from all classes, this book examines the public assertion of self by men and women in England, France and Germany from the Renaissance to Romanticism.