The Self and It Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England [Hardcover]

Objects we traditionally regard as mere imitations of the humandolls, automata, puppetsproliferated in eighteenth-century England's rapidly expanding market culture. During the same period, there arose a literary genre called the novel that turned the experience of life into a narrated object of psychological plausibility. Park makes a bold intervention in histories of the rise of the novel by arguing that the material objects abounding in eighteenth-century England's consumer markets worked in conjunction with the novel, itself a commodity fetish, as vital tools for fashioning the modern self. As it constructs a history for the psychology of objects,The Self and Itrevises a story that others have viewed as originating later: in an age of Enlightenment, things have the power to move, affect people's lives, and most of all, enable a fictional genre of selfhood. The book demonstrates just how much the modern psycheand its thrilling projections of artificial life derive from the formation of the early novel, and the reciprocal activity between made things and invented identities that underlie it.

For Park, the rest of the world inescapably defines what it means to have an interior. Eighteenth-century writers discovered in a variety of ways that to be a subject was to see oneself reflected in a great variety of external objects. That discovery both helped to fuel the development of the novel as a new literary genre and created some interesting sources of anxiety and stress. One strength of Park's study is to present this intricate movement together and to do sowhat wedo, after all!through careful and exciting attention to the forms of narration and description. Many of us have been longing for a book likeThe Self and It. With wit and style, and drawing on inventive archival research, Julie Park here finds a novel and fascinating way of telling the story of modern gendered subjectivity. She shows how often this story has overlal#§