The power of the passive self in English literature, 1640-1770 / / Scott Paul Gordon

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910808731703321
• Autore: Gordon Scott Paul <1965->
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Cambridge : , : Cambridge University Press, , 2002
• ISBN: 1-107-12505-7; 0-511-04212-4; 1-280-15955-3; 0-511-12007-9; 0-511-15703-7; 0-511-32949-0; 0-511-48425-9; 0-511-04495-X
• Edizione: [1st ed.]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (xi, 279 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)
• Disciplina: 820.9/353
• Soggetti: English literature - 18th century - History and criticism; Passivity (Psychology) in literature; English literature - Early modern, 1500-1700 - History and criticism; Christianity and literature - Great Britain - History - 18th century; Christianity and literature - Great Britain - History - 17th century; Ethics in literature; Self in literature
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-272) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Introduction. "Spring and motive of our actions": disinterest and self-interest -- "Acted by another": agency and action in early modern England -- "The belief of the people": Thomas Hobbes and the battle over the heroic -- "For want of some heedfull eye": Mr. Spectator and the power of spectacle -- "For its own sake": virtue and agency in early eighteenth-century England -- "Not perform'd at all": managing Garrick's body in eighteenth-century England -- "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.
• Sommario/riassunto: 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.