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  3. The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640–1770
  • Cited by 18
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
September 2009
Print publication year:
2002
Online ISBN:
9780511484254
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511484254
Subjects:
Literature, History, English Literature 1700-1830, History of Ideas and Intellectual History
Information

Book description

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.

Reviews

"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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