This book argues that the early modern public/private boundary was surprisingly dynamic and flexible in early modern literature, drawing upon authors including Shakespeare, Anne Lock, Mary Wroth, and Aphra Behn, and genres including lyric poetry, drama, prose fiction, and household orders. An epilogue discusses postmodern privacy in digital media.
"Performing Privacy is a carefully crafted, meticulously researched, scholarly study that cogently demonstrates the experimental formal, generic, and rhetorical strategies that early modern writers employed to trouble the formal and generic conventions of the publicity / privacy opposition. Contesting conventional approaches to the topic, Trull's study opens a capacious window on early modern constructions of privacy and gender, usefully prompting us to rethink the relationships among gender, genre, publicity, privacy, and the performance of subjectivity." (Mark Albert Johnston, Renaissance and Reformation, Vol. 38 (3), 2015)