Writing and Constructing the Self in Great Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century

John Baker is Senior Lecturer in English at Panthéon-Sorbonne University – Paris 1Marion Leclair is a doctoral student at Sorbonne Nouvelle University – Paris 3 and a research and teaching assistant at the Université de Cergy-PontoiseAllan Ingram is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle

'The easy-to-follow structure of the volume gives readers the idea of the progress of thoughts in their continuity and helps understand both congruous and controversial ideas. The selection of authors and thinkers represents a kaleidoscope of the self as perceived by contemporaries and reread by twenty-first-century scholars. Writing and Constructing the Self is a must-read for academics and university students who are concerned with the philosophical, literary, historical aspects of selfhood—along with the related notions of self-awareness, subjectivity, the first-person perspective in narratives, self-articulation, and individuality.'Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (26.1)'Writing and Constructing the Self contributes an important critical framework and serves as a touchstone for other such focused studies of the eighteenth-century self, and selves. Scholars interested in tracing the influence of Locke’s Essay and/or teaching the self to undergraduate or graduate students would find thisbook valuable, due to its division into parts and chapters that serve as discussion starters. The book’s foregrounding of women such as Haywood and Madame de La Fayette and their characters, alongside male-penned “female selves,” renders it an important contribution to feminist literary/cultural studies.'ABO

• IntroductionThe written self – John Baker and Marion LeclairPart I Early modern selves and the Reason v. Passion debate1. Anne Killigrew, a spiritual wit – Laura Alexander2. Charitable though passionate creature: the portrait of Man in late seventeenth-century sermons – Regina Maria Dal Santo3. Self-love in Mandeville and Hutcheson – Jeffrey Hopes4. Fashioning fictional selves from French sources: Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess – Orla Smyth5. The death of Cordelia and the economics of preference in eighteenth-century moral psychology – William FleschPart II Self-exploration in the Age of Reason: division and continuity6. ‘Chaos dark and deep’: grotesque selves and self-fashioning in Pope’s Dunciad – Clark Lawlor7. In two minds: Johnson, Boswell and representations of the self – Allan Ingram8. ‘The Place where my present hopes began to dawn’: space, limitation and the perception of female selfhood in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela – Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz9. The discursive construction of the self in Shaftesbury and Sterne: Tristram Shandy and the quest for identity – Gioiella Bruni RocciaPart III Romantic wanderings: the self in search of (its) place10. The anxiety of the self and the exile of the soul in Blake and Wordsworth – Laura Quinney11. Transgressing the boundaries of reason: Burke’s poetic (Miltonic) reading of the sublime – Eva Antal12. Self and community in radical defence in the French revolutionary era: the example of Oppression!!! The Appeal of Captain Perry to the People of England (1795) – Rachel RogersBibliographyIndex