Title: The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 16401770
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.
Subjects: Christianity and literature, English literature, Ethics in literature, History, History and criticism, Passivity (Psychology) in literature, Self in literature, English literature (collections), early modern, 1500-1700, English literature, history and criticism, 18th century, English literature, history and criticism, early modern, 1500-1700
Places: Great Britain
Time periods: 17th century, 18th century, Early modern, 1500-1700