- Hardcover: 290 pages
- Publisher: Cambridge University Press; First Edition edition (28 Mar 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0521810051
- ISBN-13: 978-0521810050
- Product Dimensions: 23.2 x 15.8 x 2.2 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,934,858 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640...
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"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
Product Description
Challenging recent work that contends that seventeenth-century English discourses privilege the notion of a self-enclosed, self-sufficient individual, The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature recovers a counter-tradition that imagines selves as more passively prompted than actively choosing. This tradition - which Scott Paul Gordon locates in seventeenth-century religious discourse, in early eighteenth-century moral philosophy, in mid eighteenth-century acting theory, and in the emergent novel - resists autonomy and defers agency from the individual to an external 'prompter'. Gordon argues that the trope of passivity aims to guarantee a disinterested self in a culture that was increasingly convinced that every deliberate action involves calculating one's own interest. Gordon traces the origins of such ideas 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.
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First Sentence
Discussions of agency and autonomy, terms too infrequently distinguished, often share a common assumption: to be the agent of another, rather than a self-determining subject, is an undesirable, anxiety-ridden, and disempowered position. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Discussions of agency and autonomy, terms too infrequently distinguished, often share a common assumption: to be the agent of another, rather than a self-determining subject, is an undesirable, anxiety-ridden, and disempowered position. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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