The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640–1770

This book examines passivity, and disinterestedness, in English writing during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Scott Paul Gordon (Author)

9780521021845, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 3 November 2005

292 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.463 kg

"The Power of the Passive Self is an impressive and original book that makes an important contribution to current scholarship on the origins of the modern individual." Eighteenth-Century Fiction

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 non-conformist religious tradition to their flowering in one of the central texts of eighteenth-century literature, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa.

Introduction: 'spring and motive of our actions', disinterest and self-interest
1. 'Acted by another': agency and action in early modern England
2. 'The belief of the people': Thomas Hobbes and the battle over the heroic
3. 'For want of some heedfull Eye': Mr Spectator and the power of spectacle
4. 'For its own sake': virtue and agency in early eighteenth-century England
5. 'Not perform'd at all': managing Garrick's body in eighteenth-century England
6. '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
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: History of science [PDX], Philosophy of religion [HRAB], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]