Betraying Our Selves

A study of the autobiographical instinct in a variety of 16th and 17th-century modes of writing in English, from letters and memoirs to pastoral, polemic and street ballads. The book's central concern is how selves are betrayed in texts, particularly in the centuries before autobiography was a recognised genre. It suggests that self representation in the early modern period was often indirect, emerging in oblique and surprising ways, and thereby leads us to look afresh at the era and its texts, as well as the definition of autobiography itself.