Scott Paul Gordon

Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640-1770 (eBook, PDF)

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

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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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Cambridge University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 28. März 2002
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780511029653
• Artikelnr.: 38204676

Autorenporträt

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

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction: 'spring and motive of our actions', disinterest and self-interest
1. 'Acted by another': agency and action in early modern England
2. 'The belief of the people': Thomas Hobbes and the battle over the heroic
3. 'For want of some heedfull Eye': Mr Spectator and the power of spectacle
4. 'For its own sake': virtue and agency in early eighteenth-century England
5. 'Not perform'd at all': managing Garrick's body in eighteenth-century England
6. 'I wrote my heart': Richardson's Clarissa and the tactics of sentiment
Epilogue: 'A sign of so noble a passion': the politics of disinterested selves
Bibliography.