The power of the passive self in English literature, 1640-1770
By: Scott Paul Gordon.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Cambridge, UK; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 279
Subjects: English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism.; Passivity (Psychology) in literature.; English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism.; Christianity and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 18th century.; Christianity and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 17th century.; Ethics in literature.; Self in literature.
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 nonconformist religious tradition to their flowering in one of the central texts of eighteenth-century literature, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-272) and index.