The field of personal life is a relatively new area of sociological study that seeks to understand the complexities of contemporary personal and social relationships. This includes exploration of the impact of social, economic, legal, and political change on personal experiences, opportunities, and life-styles. This ground breaking edited collection presents research on personal and public lives in a period of rapid social and political change. Relatively little is known about how personal and public aspects of life inter-relate and even less about how the outcomes of this relationship shape different areas of life. This book aims to capture and understand the effects of these overlapping spheres on the everyday lives of people in different geographical, cultural, and spatial settings. It brings together research in four key areas; migration and displacement, gender, sexuality, and health, with two main overarching themes. The first theme is how individuals cope with social, political, geographical, and cultural change in these diverse settings. The second relates to how these changes produce diverse inequalities that impact on relationships, roles, and responsibilities. The book thus seeks to increase the visibility of particular aspects of life that have often been neglected in social science research and subsequently open them up to further research and debate.
Juxtaposing life writing and romance, this study offers the first book-length exploration of the dynamic and complex relationship between the two genres. In so doing, it operates at the intersection of several recent trends: interest in women's contributions to autobiography; greater awareness of the diversity and flexibility of auto/biographical forms in the early modern period; and the use of manuscripts and other material evidence to trace literacy practices. Through analysis of a wide variety of life writings by early modern Englishwomen-including Elizabeth Delaval, Dorothy Calthorpe, Ann Fanshawe, and Anne Halkett-Julie A. Eckerle demonstrates that these women were not only familiar with the controversial romance genre but also deeply influenced by it. Romance, she argues, with its unending tales of unsatisfying love, spoke to something in women's experience; offered a model by which they could recount their own disappointments in a world where arranged marriage and often loveless matches ruled the day; and exerted a powerful, pervasive pressure on their textual self-formations. Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen's Life Writing documents a vibrant secular form of auto/biographical writing that coexisted alongside numerous spiritual forms, providing a much more nuanced and complete understanding of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women's reading and writing literacies.
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