The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640-1770

ISBN-13: 9780521810050 / Angielski / Twarda / 2002 / 292 str.

Scott Paul Gordon

Opis

Challenging recent work contending that seventeenth-century English discourses privilege the notion of a self-enclosed, self-sufficient individual, this study recovers a counter-tradition that imagines selves as more passively prompted than actively choosing. Gordon traces the origins of such ideas of passivity from their roots in the non-conformist religious tradition to their flowering in one of the central texts of eighteenth-century literature, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa.

Recenzje

"The Power of the Passive Self is an impressive and original book that makes an important contribution to current scholarship on the origins of the modern individual." Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Spis treści

Introduction: 'spring and motive of our actions', disinterest and self-interest; 1. 'Acted by another': agency and action in early modern England; 2. 'The belief of the people': Thomas Hobbes and the battle over the heroic; 3. 'For want of some heedfull Eye': Mr Spectator and the power of spectacle; 4. 'For its own sake': virtue and agency in early eighteenth-century England; 5. 'Not perform'd at all': managing Garrick's body in eighteenth-century England; 6. 'I wrote my heart': Richardson's Clarissa and the tactics of sentiment; Epilogue: 'A sign of so noble a passion': the politics of disinterested selves; Bibliography.