“Free and Easy as ones discourse”?: Genre and Self-Expression in the Poems and Letters of Early Modern Englishwomen

Wilcox, Helen

doi:10.4324/9781315584324-2

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Love-letters and The Royal Society1

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2020

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“…As Helen Wilcox notes, "As a mode of self-expression […] the early modern letter can be richly expressive but also deceptive and ambiguous, offering and yet denying selfconstruction". 13 Behn's letters in Part 1 recognize this aspect of epistolarity, highlighting how the self represented in and through letters is artifice. As MacLean puts it, "after all, identity is only ever a rhetorical strategy, available as a trope".…”

Section: Love-letters and The Royal Societymentioning

confidence: 98%

From Epistle to Epistemology: Love-Letters and The Royal Society

Gevirtz¹

2014

Women's Writing

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Section: Love-letters and The Royal Societymentioning

confidence: 98%

From Epistle to Epistemology: Love-Letters and The Royal Society

Gevirtz¹

2014

Women's Writing

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Living Philosophy: Self-revelation and Damaris Masham’s Philosophical Autobiography

Webb

2020

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

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The seventeenth-century philosopher Damaris Masham (1658/59–1708) had an intimate and emotional relationship with her friend and companion John Locke (1632–1704), and corresponded with him over many years. Her extensive surviving letters to Locke have been largely overlooked by scholarship on her philosophy. Setting Masham’s letters in the context of philosophical and historical scholarship on autobiography, as well as Berel Lang’s work on philosophical genre, I argue that her letters to Locke should be read as a form of philosophical autobiography. By doing so, unrecognized aspects of Masham’s philosophical position on selfhood and sociability are made visible. Furthermore, I show how the personal and the philosophical are inextricable in the letters and argue that lived emotional experience is of philosophical value. This point is of particular import in the project of retrieval of women philosophers throughout history, but should also be taken into account in the context of a modern philosophical milieu that often privileges “arguing that” as the only legitimate mode of philosophical practice.

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“Free and Easy as ones discourse”?: Genre and Self-Expression in the Poems and Letters of Early Modern Englishwomen

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

From Epistle to Epistemology: Love-Letters and The Royal Society

From Epistle to Epistemology: Love-Letters and The Royal Society

Living Philosophy: Self-revelation and Damaris Masham’s Philosophical Autobiography

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