| Title:
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THE POWER OF THE PASSIVE SELF IN ENGLISH LITERATURE, 1640-1770
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| By: |
Scott Paul Gordon |
| Format: |
Hardback |
| List price:
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£90.00 |
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| ISBN 10: |
0521810051 |
| ISBN 13: |
9780521810050 |
| Publisher: |
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS |
| Pub. date: |
28 March, 2002 |
| Pages: |
292 |
| Description: |
This book examines passivity, and disinterestedness, in English writing during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. |
| 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. |
| Publication: |
UK |
| Imprint: |
Cambridge University Press |
| Returns: |
Returnable |
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