ENGL 567 B1: Women's Life Writing Pre-1800

K. Binhammer

The writing lives of medieval, early modern and eighteenth-century women encompass large shifts in the history of gender, nation, religion and print culture. How does their life writing embody these shifts? What can we learn about pre-1800 constructions of self by reading how women represented their own lives in letters, autobiographies, diaries, scandal memoirs, and ephemeral forms such as commonplace books and trial testimony? This course will be grounded in the *Orlando* digital textbase and will use the many digital resources for the study of early women’s writing, including digitized manuscripts. We will consider the relationship between the representation of self and the media history of such representation as well as between feminist biography and women's literary self-representation.