POWER OF THE PASSIVE SELF IN ENGLISH LITERATURE - 1640-1770, THE

Challenging recent work contending that seventeenth-century English discourses privilege the notion of a self-enclosed, self-sufficient individual, this study recovers a counter-tradition that imagines selves as more passively prompted than activelychoosing. Gordon traces the origins of such ideas of passivity 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.

Contents - 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.