Description

Book Synopsis

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 autob

Trade Review
"This is, quite simply, an important, memorable and profoundly original book." * Timothy J. Reiss, New York University *
"A noteworthy contribution." * Choice *

Being Interior

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    A Hardback by Nicholas D. Paige

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      Book details

      Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press
      Published 12 December 2000
      ISBN-13 9780812235777
      978-0812235777
      ISBN-10 0812235770

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      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 autob

      Trade Review
      "This is, quite simply, an important, memorable and profoundly original book." * Timothy J. Reiss, New York University *
      "A noteworthy contribution." * Choice *

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