Description: Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century is a collection of essays on memoir, biography, and autobiography during a formative period for the genre. Employing the methodology William Godwin outlined for novelists of taking material "from all sources, experience, report, and the records of human affairs," each contributor examines within the contexts of their time and historical traditions the anxieties and imperatives of the auto/biographer as she or he shapes material into a legacy.
Review Quotes: "Caldwell's edited collection thus offers invaluable models for the analysis of life-writing in its various modes, even beyond the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century subjects included. The stellar essays provide useful strategies for reading various genres even being written today beyond the typical life-writing forms of biography and autobiography."-- "Eighteenth-Century Studies"