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In her essay Marion Leclair studies the novels of Godwin, Holcroft and Bage from the perspective of novelistic conventions. She argues that the fact that these eighteenth-century British radical novelists posed a challenge to established authority is reflected in the form of their novels. She explains how Godwin, Holcroft and Bage subverted three components of the prevailing novelistic order – style, plot and narration. She insists that the works of all three express a criticism of the conventional style of novels, seen as formulaic and untrue to life. In return, they had an embryonic stylistic programme for their novels which rejected the conventional style of such highly popular and marketable novels as sentimental novels and gothic romances. Leclair concludes that recasting the conventional novelistic mould allowed these writers to challenge the politics and morals of their time.
The introduction provides a general background to the notion of the self while focusing on the long eighteenth century, and the way writers of the period perceived and expressed the self, and framed their arguments in the domains of literature and philosophy in particular. In so doing it underlines the importance of the elaboration and expression of the self and its recognisably modern identity. It emphasises the decisive contributions of John Locke and David Hume, of Blaise Pascal and Alexander Pope, to a debate on the self that informed the long eighteenth century, contributions which still provide significant elements of the ongoing debates on the self and individualism today. As an overview of the volume’s chapters and arguments, the introduction gives a brief presentation of each of the contributions, sketching out how they constitute at once a patchwork and a chronological narrative, and examine the self from different perspectives related to gender, philosophy, religion, morality and politics, where the protean nature of the self is expressed and explored in different genres and discourses: sermons, poetry, philosophical texts, novels and diaries.
This volume of twelve essays, preceded by an introduction that succinctly frames
the problematic and history of the notion of the ‘self’, examines the various
ways the ‘self’ was perceived, fashioned and written in the course of the long
eighteenth century in Great Britain. It highlights, in particular, the interface
between literature and philosophy. The chapters include discussion of
philosophers such as Locke, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hume, Hutcheson and Smith,
churchmen such as Isaac Barrow and John Tillotson, the novelists Eliza Haywood,
Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne, the poets Anne Killigrew, Alexander Pope,
William Blake and William Wordsworth, the writers and sometime diarists Samuel
Johnson and James Boswell, and the radical writer Sampson Perry.
The
originality of the studies lies in their focus on the varied ways of seeing and
saying the self, and what Locke called personal identity. They foreground the
advent of a recognisably modern, individualistic and ‘sustainable’ self, which,
still today, remains plural and enigmatic. The book should appeal to a wide
public, both undergraduate and graduate students working in Literature and the
Humanities, in particular those interested in the Enlightenment period, as well
as researchers and the general public interested in questions related to
identity and consciousness and their formulation in the past and
present.
The volume follows a chronological narrative which surveys the
intriguing and protean nature of the ‘self’ from varied perspectives and as
expressed in different genres. It assembles contributions from both confirmed
and young researchers from Britain, Europe and the United States.