The Self and It

[Dave Monroe]

Introduction: Its, Parts, Wholes, and the Eighteenth-Century Self

http://www.sup.org/books/extra/?id=11737&i=Introduction_pages

On Sat, Jul 25, 2015 at 12:43 AM, Dave Monroe
<against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
> http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=11737
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