Writing and constructing the self in Great Britain in the long eighteenth century / edited by John Baker, Allan Ingram, Marion Leclair.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The injunction, 'Know thyself!', resounding down the centuries, has never lost its appeal and urgency. The 'self' remains an abiding and universal concern, something at once intimate, indispensable and elusive; something we take for granted and yet remains difficult to pin down, describe or define. This volume of twelve essays explores how writers in different domains - philosophers and thinkers, novelists, poets, churchmen, political writers and others - construed, fashioned and expressed the self in written form in Great Britain in the course of the long eighteenth century from the Restoration to the period of the French Revolution. The essays are preceded by an introduction that seeks to frame several key aspects of the debate on the self in a succinct and open-minded spirit. The volume foregrounds the coming into being of a recognisably modern self.

Print version record.

Front matter; Contents; Contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction; PART I: Early modern selves and the Reason v. Passion debate; Anne Killigrew: a spiritual wit; Charitable though passionate creature: the portrait of Man in late seventeenth-century sermons; Self-love in Mandeville and Hutcheson; Fashioning fictional selves from French sources: Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess; The death of Cordelia and the economics of preference in eighteenth-century moral psychology; PART II: Self-exploration in the Age of Reason: division and continuity.

'Chaos dark and deep': grotesque selves and self-fashioning in Pope's DunciadIn two minds: Johnson, Boswell and representations of the self; 'The place where my present hopes began to dawn': space, limitation and the perception of female selfhood in Samuel Richardson's Pamela; The discursive construction of the self in Shaftesbury and Sterne: Tristram Shandy and the quest for identity; PART III: Romantic wanderings: the self in search of (its) place; The anxiety of the self and the exile of the soul in Blake and Wordsworth.

Transgressing the boundaries of reason: Burke's poetic (Miltonic) reading of the sublimeSelf and community in radical defence in the French revolutionary era: the example of Oppression!!! The Appeal of Captain Perry to the People of England (1795); Bibliography; Index.

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