Authorial Self-Projection Mechanisms in Early-Modern Times

Abstract

The following lines aim to draw the necessary coordinates where to insert various studies about the self-projection of the authorial self. In their attempt to build an individual author profile in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we witness the writing of texts such as life stories or biographies that seek to canonize directly or indirectly, in clear relationship with Bourdieu’s concept of the literary field and that of the canon. In turn, notions such as Greenblatt’s self-fashioning will be reflected in the self-propaganda practiced by the authors of the time in their search for authorial self-affirmation, creating alter egos, interspersing historical, literary, and biographical data, reflecting on their condition as writers, creating an individual and defined authorial self, which, at times, defines a literary republic in which to situate themselves.