This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.

Having previously given us a close study of Vico's New Science, Verene turns his attention in his most recent book not to Vico's "new science" but to his "new art," arguing that as Vico was the founder of the philosophy of history in the New Science, so he may be seen equally to be the founder of the modern art of autobiography in his Life. This should not be taken to mean, however, that Verene has nothing to do with the (...) New Science in his account of the Vichian act of autobiography; on the contrary, his argument is that in the Life Vico contemplates, comprehends, and narrates his own life history according to the same principles, mythic design, and structural schemata as he contemplates, comprehends, and narrates the history of all humanity in the New Science. Thus, "the New Science is the autobiography of humanity," Verene tells us, and. (shrink)