The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England

By Julie Park

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804756961
• ISBN13: 9780804756969
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.0"