Reading the Early Modern English Diary

Miriam Nandi is Professor of English Literature at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Her research interests include literary theory, early modern autobiographical writing, and postcolonial literature. She is the author of M/Other India/s (2007) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2009) and has co-edited Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature, with Monika Fludernik (2014) and MatteReality: Historical Trajectories and Conceptual Futures in Material Culture Studies, with Ingrid Gessner and Juliane Schwarz-Bierschenk, (2019). Recent publications include work on cultural memory studies and early modern diaries.

• 1 Introduction.- 2 Defining the Diary.- 3 The Diary as Cultural Practice.- 4 Creating Pious Identity: Margaret Hoby’s Reformist Diary.- 5 Anne Clifford’s “Activist” Diaries.- 6 “My Own Hearte out of Frame”: Emotions, Relations, and Religion in Ralph Josselin’s Diary.- 7 Enjoying the Diary: Samuel Pepys and the Transitions of Diary-Writing.- 8 Coda.

“Miriam Nandi’s Reading the Early Modern English Diary offers an interesting psychoanalytic and historical reading of early modern English diaries by Margaret Hoby, Anne Clifford, Ralph Josselin, and Samuel Pepys. … This is still a rewarding study, though. Nandi’s book is written in a crisp, interesting style, often with felicitous distinctions, and with clear argumentation throughout. … Nandi illuminates the early modern diary, and her analytical work is richly suggestive and worth the reading.” (Elizabeth Hodgson, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 75 (4), 2022)