Montaigne and the Life of Freedom: 101 (Ideas in Context, Series Number 101) - Hardcover

Green, Felicity

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1107024390 ISBN 13: 9781107024397

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2012

Synopsis

More than any other early modern text, Montaigne's Essais have come to be associated with the emergence of a distinctively modern subjectivity, defined in opposition to the artifices of language and social performance. Felicity Green challenges this interpretation with a compelling revisionist reading of Montaigne's text, centred on one of his deepest but hitherto most neglected preoccupations: the need to secure for himself a sphere of liberty and independence that he can properly call his own, or himself. Montaigne and the Life of Freedom restores the Essais to its historical context by examining the sources, character and significance of Montaigne's project of self-study. That project, as Green shows, reactivates and reshapes ancient practices of self-awareness and self-regulation, in order to establish the self as a space of inner refuge, tranquillity and dominion, free from the inward compulsion of the passions and from subjection to external objects, forces and persons.

About this title

Review:

'Stimulating and challenging.' The Times Literary Supplement

Book Description:

This book uncovers the centrality and complexity of notions of freedom in Montaigne's thought, thereby challenging prevailing accounts of the Essais as a forerunner of modern understandings of the self. It will appeal to scholars and postgraduate students of early modern intellectual history and literature, and to cultural historians and philosophers.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1107024390
• ISBN 13: 9781107024397
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 265