This thing we name the individual, this piece of matter, this length of memory, this bearer of a proper name, this block in space, this whisper in time, this self-delighting, self-condemning oddity – what is it? who made it? Ours may be the age of narcissism, but it is also the century in which ego suffered unprecedented attacks upon its great pretensions, to be self-transparent and self-authorized. It discovered enemies within and enemies without; walls within, mirrors without; it no longer perched securely on the throne of the self; it no longer sat confidently at the center of the social world. The wandering “I” is the protagonist of this study whose chief interest is to read eight big novels (big even when they are little) which move between the longing to recover some figure of the self, to preserve some vessel of subjectivity, and the willingness to let it go, to release the knot of subjectivity.

Accordingly, the main current of argument in this book will follow the diverse fortunes of individuality in modern English fiction: its changing verbal aspect, its historical limits and symbolic resources, its political dispossession, cultural displacement and psychological self-estrangement, its uneasy accommodation of mind and body, its retreat from the world and its longing for community. Cast in the broadest terms, this study attempts to chart the lambent movements of post-Romantic subjectivity as it endures the heavy pressures of modern history and modernist literary experiment.