Description
Book SynopsisThe 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 *
