Writing and Constructing the Self in Great Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century

Description

The injunction, 'Know thyself!', resounding down the centuries, has never lost its appeal and urgency. The 'self' remains an abiding and universal concern, something at once intimate, indispensable and elusive; something we take for granted and yet remains difficult to pin down, describe or define. This volume of twelve essays explores how writers in different domains - philosophers and thinkers, novelists, poets, churchmen, political writers and others - construed, fashioned and expressed the self in written form in Great Britain in the course of the long eighteenth century from the Restoration to the period of the French Revolution. The essays are preceded by an introduction that seeks to frame several key aspects of the debate on the self in a succinct and open-minded spirit. The volume foregrounds the coming into being of a recognisably modern self. -- .

John Baker is Senior Lecturer in English at Pantheon-Sorbonne University - Paris 1 Marion Leclair is a doctoral student at Sorbonne Nouvelle University - Paris 3 and a research and teaching assistant at the Universite de Cergy-Pontoise Allan Ingram is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle -- .

'The easy-to-follow structure of the volume gives readers the idea of the progress of thoughts in their continuity and helps understand both congruous and controversial ideas. The selection of authors and thinkers represents a kaleidoscope of the self as perceived by contemporaries and reread by twenty-first-century scholars. Writing and Constructing the Self is a must-read for academics and university students who are concerned with the philosophical, literary, historical aspects of selfhood-along with the related notions of self-awareness, subjectivity, the first-person perspective in narratives, self-articulation, and individuality.' Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (26.1) 'Writing and Constructing the Self contributes an important critical framework and serves as a touchstone for other such focused studies of the eighteenth-century self, and selves. Scholars interested in tracing the influence of Locke's Essay and/or teaching the self to undergraduate or graduate students would find this book valuable, due to its division into parts and chapters that serve as discussion starters. The book's foregrounding of women such as Haywood and Madame de La Fayette and their characters, alongside male-penned "female selves," renders it an important contribution to feminist literary/cultural studies.' ABO -- .