The familiar classical France of splendor, formalism, and conquest had a hidden double, one ruled by the cultural imperative to "be interior," to look inside oneself and to write about what one found. Being Interior explores how seventeenth-century readers and writers busied themselves with the pressing task of inventing a text commensurate with these newly opened subjective depths. Their practices laid the groundwork not only for the future success of autobiography as a genre but also for our entire modern culture of interiority.In tracing the emergence of autobiography as a privileged mediation between interior and exterior worlds, Nicholas D. Paige turns his attention where few have looked: to the wealth of material contained in religious writing of the period, much of it by women. Combining the evidence furnished by the material transmission of these works with a theoretical understanding of the contradictions built into subjectivity, Paige explains why categories like autobiography and experience, despite their problematic nature, have become unavoidable components of the modern world. "Being Interior" speaks not only to specialists of autobiography and classical France but also to readers interested in the constructions of gender and authorship, the history of private life and reading practices, and the past and future of interiorized subjectivity.

Based on a systematic sampling of nearly 2000 French and English novels from 1601 to 1830, this book's foremost aim is to ask precisely how the novel evolved. Instead of simply 'rising', as scholars have been saying for some sixty years, the novel is in fact a system in constant flux, made up of artifacts - formally distinct novel types - that themselves rise, only to inevitably fall. Nicholas D. Paige argues that these artifacts are technologies, each with traceable origins, each needing time for adoption (at the expense of already developed technologies) and also for abandonment. Like technological waves in more physical domains, the rises and falls of novelistic technologies don't happen automatically: writers invent and adopt literary artifacts for many diverse reasons. However, looking not at individual works but at the novel as a patterned system provides a startlingly persuasive new way of understanding the history and evolution of artforms.

Based on a systematic sampling of nearly 2000 French and English novels from 1601 to 1830, this book's foremost aim is to ask precisely how the novel evolved. Instead of simply 'rising', as scholars have been saying for some sixty years, the novel is in fact a system in constant flux, made up of artifacts - formally distinct novel types - that themselves rise, only to inevitably fall. Nicholas D. Paige argues that these artifacts are technologies, each with traceable origins, each needing time for adoption (at the expense of already developed technologies) and also for abandonment. Like technological waves in more physical domains, the rises and falls of novelistic technologies don't happen automatically: writers invent and adopt literary artifacts for many diverse reasons. However, looking not at individual works but at the novel as a patterned system provides a startlingly persuasive new way of understanding the history and evolution of artforms.