ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains how notions of intention animate author's own interpretive practice and shares poststructuralism's aim to critique ideas of absolute subjective autonomy. It examines Kastan's opinion that authorial intention is 'something more than a product of the text and something less than its exclusive producer writing, understood as an imaginative act, is inevitably less an invention than an 'intervention". The book looks at Augustine's influence on the period's literary discourse. It shows why it was the female will in particular that in the early modern period became a model for ideas of privacy, autonomy, and intention informing not only notions of literary expression but also an emerging discourse of human rights. The book concerns versions of the self that accompanied clear changes in the social structure, namely the growth of capitalist market relations and forms of democratic participation.
