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The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640â"1770 - No Information Available

The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640â"1770

By: No Information Available

Hardcover | 28 March 2002

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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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"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

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Paperback

Published: 3rd November 2005

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