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

Gordon, Scott Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521810051 ISBN 13: 9780521810050

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Scott Paul Gordon is an Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania. He has published numerous articles on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century subjects.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521810051
• ISBN 13: 9780521810050
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 292