Psychosocial spaces
Subtitle: verbal and visual readings of British culture, 1750-1820
By: Steven J. Gores.
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Detroit, Mich
Language: eng
Number of pages: 223
Subjects: English fiction -- 18th century -- History and criticism.; Social psychology and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 18th century.; Social psychology and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century.; English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Identity (Psychology) in literature.; Subjectivity in literature.; Social psychology in art.; Self in literature.; Art, British.; Great Britain -- Social life and customs -- 18th century.; Great Britain -- Social life and customs -- 19th century.
Description: "Gores first analyzes Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker and Jane Austen's Persuasion in conjunction with visual evidence of social settings they contain, such as the London pleasure gardens of Ranelagh and Vauxhall. Through this analysis, he describes how assertions of identity and rank were becoming more complicated as social space was shaped by the architectural articulation of space and the codification of etiquette.".

"He next examines Sophia Lee's novel The Recess, along with prints and sketches of ruins, to place the monastic ruin at the focus of desire to repress discontinuity in the past, which in turn permitted individuals to conceive of constructing identity based on genealogy.

Then, through a study of Henry Fielding's Amelia, he discusses portrait miniatures and silhouettes as fetishized symbols of erotic ties, showing how images of a beloved, with their promises for the future, were used as a basis for constructing individual identity."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 207-220) and index.