The rhetoric of autobiography in the seventeenth century
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Peter Burke
Abstract
Used about seventeenth-century texts, the term autobiography is of course an anachronism, though it may be a useful one. It may be helpful to think in terms of concentric circles of ego-document with what we call autobiographies at the centre. These autobiographies often give the impression of opening a window onto a different world. However, this sense of transparency is a dangerous illusion, at least in certain respects, so that scholars who use this kind of source would do well to make use of the idea of the unreliable narrator. This paper offers a brief survey of techniques of self-presentation in seventeenth-century European autobiographies before focussing on a case-study of John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding and its combination of oral and written rhetoric.
Abstract
Used about seventeenth-century texts, the term autobiography is of course an anachronism, though it may be a useful one. It may be helpful to think in terms of concentric circles of ego-document with what we call autobiographies at the centre. These autobiographies often give the impression of opening a window onto a different world. However, this sense of transparency is a dangerous illusion, at least in certain respects, so that scholars who use this kind of source would do well to make use of the idea of the unreliable narrator. This paper offers a brief survey of techniques of self-presentation in seventeenth-century European autobiographies before focussing on a case-study of John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding and its combination of oral and written rhetoric.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Preface & Acknowledgements vii
- Ego-documents in a historical-sociolinguistic perspective 1
- A lady-in-waiting’s begging letter to her former employer (Paris, mid-sixteenth century) 19
- Epistolary formulae and writing experience in Dutch letters from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 45
- From ul to U.E. 67
- Flat adverbs and Jane Austen’s letters 91
- Letters from Gaston B. 107
- Written documents 129
- The rhetoric of autobiography in the seventeenth century 149
- “All the rest ye must lade yourself” 165
- Cordials and sharp satyrs 183
- Self-reference and ego involvement in the 1820 Settler petition as a leaking genre 201
- Ego-documents in Lithuanian 225
- The language of slaves on the island of St Helena, South Atlantic, 1682–1724 243
- Index 277
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Preface & Acknowledgements vii
- Ego-documents in a historical-sociolinguistic perspective 1
- A lady-in-waiting’s begging letter to her former employer (Paris, mid-sixteenth century) 19
- Epistolary formulae and writing experience in Dutch letters from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 45
- From ul to U.E. 67
- Flat adverbs and Jane Austen’s letters 91
- Letters from Gaston B. 107
- Written documents 129
- The rhetoric of autobiography in the seventeenth century 149
- “All the rest ye must lade yourself” 165
- Cordials and sharp satyrs 183
- Self-reference and ego involvement in the 1820 Settler petition as a leaking genre 201
- Ego-documents in Lithuanian 225
- The language of slaves on the island of St Helena, South Atlantic, 1682–1724 243
- Index 277
