eBooks - Education - Literary Studies - Scott Paul Gordon - The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640±1770
The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640±1770 eBook
by Scott Paul Gordon
|
Platforms
Windows Vista / XP / 2000, Mac OS X, Sony Reader Features
|
Availability:
Download Now Price: $56.00
|
The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640±1770 Summary
| 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. |
|
|
eBooks - Titles - Authors - Education - Literary Studies - Scott Paul Gordon - The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640±1770