The Self and It

[Dave Monroe]

The Self and It
Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England
JULIE PARK

2009
312 PP.
$52.50

Cloth ISBN: 9780804756969
Digital ISBN: 9780804773348


Objects we traditionally regard as "mere" imitations of the
human—dolls, automata, puppets—proliferated 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 It revises 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 psyche—and 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.

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