Frederick Garber studies in a wide range of English, French, German, and American literary texts instances of the struggle for the self's autonomy during the period preceding modernism. In tracing a pattern that changes from the unsettling of bourgeois conditions in Richardson to the collapse of that challenge in the Decadents, he demonstrates that this period is characterized by a pervasive dialectic of aloofness and association.

Originally published in 1982.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously...

Frederick Garber takes up in detail several problems of the self broached in his previous book, The Autonomy of the Self from Richardson to Huysmans (Princeton, 1982). Using patterns in Byron's canon as models, he focuses on the relations of self-making and text-making as a central Romantic issue. For Byron and many of his contemporaries, putting a text into the world meant putting a self there along with it, and it also meant that the difficulties of establishing the one inevitably reflect the parallel difficulties in the other.

Professor Garber discusses some of Byron's key...