Signalling Identity: The Global I.

The paper will deal with two topics of comparative interest: how scholarship especially of the last twenty years has described literature of the late Middle Ages and early modern period in terms that reflect the state of things before the emergence of individualism -- that is, refusing to ascribe an anachronistic 'selfhood' to the works of an era before such a term became current, and having to recover or invent an approach that is historically responsible -- and how recent scholarship has developed models of cultural interpretation particular to our own period of post-individualist thinking. That is, the first phase of the paper will address a kind of historical scholarship that has had some success in unlocking the outlook of the late medieval and early modern periods, while the second phase will describe a general approach in comparative literature that can be adapted to any historical and cultural situation. The paper will conclude with a consideration of the differences between these two complementary approaches. The primary materials discussed include Petrarch, La Celestina, Vaz de Caminha's Carta, and Shakespeare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]