Early Modern Writing and the Privatization of Experience

Reading a wide range of early modern authors and exploring their cultural-historical, philosophical and scientific contexts, Early Modern Writing and the Privatization of Experience examines the shift in focus from reliance on shared experience to placing of trust in individualized experience which occurs in the writing and culture of the period. Nick Davis contends that much of the era's literary production participates significantly in this broad cultural movement.

Among the writers discussed are Chaucer, Thomas More, Spenser, Nashe, Jonson, Middleton, the Shakespeare of the Henry IV - Henry V plays and The Winter's Tale, Hobbes, Bunyan, Defoe and Pope.