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Author Gordon, Scott Paul, 1965-

Title The power of the passive self in English literature, 1640-1770 / Scott Paul Gordon.

Publication Info. Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (xi, 279 pages)
Physical Medium polychrome
Description text file
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-272) and index.
Contents Introduction. "Spring and motive of our actions": disinterest and self-interest -- "Acted by another": agency and action in early modern England -- "The belief of the people": Thomas Hobbes and the battle over the heroic -- "For want of some heedfull eye": Mr. Spectator and the power of spectacle -- "For its own sake": virtue and agency in early eighteenth-century England -- "Not perform'd at all": managing Garrick's body in eighteenth-century England -- "I wrote my heart": Richardson's Clarissa and the tactics of sentiment -- Epilogue: "A sign of so noble a passion": the politics of disinterested selves.
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 nonconformist religious tradition to their flowering in one of the central texts of eighteenth-century literature, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa."--Jacket.
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Subject English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism.
English literature.
Chronological Term 18th century
Subject Passivity (Psychology) in literature.
Passivity (Psychology) in literature.
Christianity and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 18th century.
Christianity and literature.
Great Britain.
History.
Ethics in literature.
Ethics in literature.
Self in literature.
Self in literature.
Chronological Term 1500-1799
Indexed Term Litteratur Engelsk, amerikansk litteratur.
Genre/Form Electronic books.
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History.
Other Form: Print version: Gordon, Scott Paul, 1965- Power of the passive self in English literature, 1640-1770. Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2002 0521810051 (DLC) 2001043612 (OCoLC)48013180
ISBN 0511042124 (electronic book)
9780511042126 (electronic book)
9780521810050
0521810051
0511120079 (electronic book)
9780511120077 (electronic book)
9780511484254 (electronic book)
0511484259 (electronic book)
9780511044953 (electronic book)
051104495X (electronic book)
0511157037
9780511157035
1280159553
9781280159558