The Visual Worlds of Life Writing: Portraits and Biographical Practice in England, c. 1660s to 1750s

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.

Early modern life writing extended far beyond the written word. People were painted, drawn, and sculpted; their biographies were illustrated, their pictures inscribed, and their signatures considered akin to self-portraits.

The Visual Worlds of Life Writing explores representations of individuals in the visual and literary culture of early Enlightenment England. At its centre are portraits and biographies, the most popular artistic and literary genres, which navigated concepts of character, identity, likeness, and difference, while increasingly staking a claim to aesthetic excellence. As potent cultural products on the art and print market, they were also key instruments of social formation at a time of nation-building, indispensable for the making of political culture and the public sphere.

Surveying the splendid diversity of portrayals - from painting and sculpture to frontispiece portraits and book illustrations, as well as micrographic and calligraphic portraits - The Visual Worlds of Life Writing reconstructs how individuality and collectivity were fashioned across different media. A thorough reassessment of visual culture’s interplay with biographical practice, the book offers an analysis of the rhetorics of portraiture and life writing, a historical account of their sister arts tradition, and an inquiry into the social function of profling people.

Kerstin Maria Pahl is Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and Associate Researcher/Chercheuse associée at the Université du Québec à Montréal. In 2023 and 2024, she was Visiting Professor at Humboldt University Berlin.