"The Men and Women Merely Players" : performing the self in nineteenth-century literary autobiography /
Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, and John Henry Cardinal Newman each use autobiographical forms to portray a specific, controlled, and positive self-image for the literary marketplace. Staging their autobiographies as performances, these authors create, inhabit, and act out the r...
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| Format: | Thesis Book |
| Language: | English |
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[Place of publication not identified] :
[publisher not identified] ;
2002.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://proxy.library.tamu.edu/login?url=http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=726450711&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=2945&RQT=309&VName=PQD |
| Summary: | Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, and John Henry Cardinal Newman each use autobiographical forms to portray a specific, controlled, and positive self-image for the literary marketplace. Staging their autobiographies as performances, these authors create, inhabit, and act out the role of protagonist in a social drama; they place themselves on the literary stage and write lines for and about themselves to produce a desired effect on their audiences. In studying these performances, "'The Men and Women Merely Players'" resituates each work in its contemporary context-including the history of each author's reputation and each autobiography's reception-in order to highlight the strategies through which these authors counter negative perceptions of themselves. As such, these authors respond to extra-textual concerns through the public action of the publication of their lives. After discussing the limits and challenges of life writing through a discussion of Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, I investigate the patterns of organization, expression, and revision in Robinson's Memoirs, Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and Leigh Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries and his Autobiography. This dissertation argues that each text reveals itself as a performance, a self-conscious construction of a particular self crafted to respond to social perceptions of each author. In doing so, I assert that the creation of and performance in a role in autobiography emerges as an important way to interpret nineteenth-century literary life-writing, for it illuminates how writers viewed themselves in their social environment and demonstrates that neither texts nor selves can escape that context. |
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| Item Description: | Vita. "Major Subject: English". |
| Physical Description: | viii, 183 leaves ; 28 cm. Issued also on microfiche from University Microfilm Inc. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (leaves 170-182). |