Remaking the self in John Dunton’s The Life and Errors of John Dunton (1705)

© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. John Dunton (1659–1732) is a bookseller and writer best known today as a tireless self-promoter whose I-centred and experimental work contributed to the development of the novel and autobiography in the eighteenth century. This article is the first full-length study of his own autobiographical record, The Life and Errors of John Dunton (1705). Dunton the showman is in plentiful evidence in this text, but he also presents another, more sober and serious-minded version of the self by following accounts of earlier stages of his life with their reformed versions. His coupling of religious-led self-examination with a commitment to literary novelty makes The Life a most unusual form of spiritual autobiography in its early stages. Yet The Life is a composite text in an even more obvious sense than this. For around half-way through the text Dunton abandons his close focus on the self for hundreds of cursory character sketches of his contemporaries, and in doing so swaps spiritual considerations for indirect comments on his own social activities and commercial concerns. This article studies these two main, ostensibly opposed, sections of The Life–its autobiographical and biographical material–and suggests points of contact between them

Pratos e mais pratos: louças domésticas, divisões culturais e limites sociais no Rio de Janeiro, século XIX

Reply to ten comments on a paper published in the last issue of this journal. The discussion follows along six main lines: History museums, identity, ideology and the category of nation; the need of material collections and their modalities: patrimonial, operational, virtual; theater versus laboratory; visitors and their ambiguities; Public History: the museum and the academy.Resposta aos comentários de dez especialistas que contribuíram no debate de texto publicado no último número desta revista. A discussão orientou-se segundo seis tópicos principais: museus históricos, identidade, ideologia e a categoria de nação; a necessidade de acervos materiais e suas modalidades: acervo patrimonial, operacional, virtual; teatro versus laboratório; o público e suas ambigüidades; História Pública: o museu e a Academia