Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591-1791 - Hardcover

Mascuch, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804729018 ISBN 13: 9780804729017

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 1997

Synopsis

This book offers an account of the origins of modern English autobiographical writing, which the author locates in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it links the development of this genre with the emergence of modern ideas of the self, where self-identity becomes its own object and telos.

The author's analytic framework for assessing the evolution of autobiographical practice is broadly cultural; he views autobiographical practice as a public performance, an assertion of new forms of self-identity. Throughout his analysis, he seeks to bring together a complex of technological and economic developments (in reading, printing, and marketing—i.e., the beginnings of print culture) with a set of institutional pressures and constraints (especially efforts aimed at achieving social and religious control)—all of which operated with people and their discourse to produce modern autobiographical narratives.

In the process of tracing the origins of modern autobiography, the author discovers that although early autobiographies have come to be equated largely with a male, middle-class subject, the historical agents active in creating the genre were more diverse than is commonly assumed. For example, though the actual roles of women and the poor were always marginal, the author finds that members of both groups contributed to the production of modern autobiography.

By providing a genealogy of modern autobiography—along with what the author calls its referent, the individualist self—in a particular historical and cultural context (early modern England), the book helps to revise more traditional, universalist accounts of the "rise of individualism" and its role within political culture in the last two centuries.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

This book traces the emergence of the concept of self-identity in modern Western culture, as it was both reflected in and advanced by the development of autobiographical practice in early modern England. It offers a fresh and illuminating appraisal of the nature of autobiographical narrative in general and of the early modern forms of biography, diary and autobiography in particular. The result is a significant and original contribution to the history of individualism.

Michael Mascuch argues that the definitive characteristic of individualist self-identity is the personal capacity to produce a unified retrospective autobiographical narrative, and he stresses that this capacity was first demonstrated in England during the last decade of the eighteenth century. He examines the long-term process of innovation in written discourse leading up to this event, from the first use of blank almanacs and common place books by the pious in the late sixteenth century, through the popular criminal biographies of the late seventeenth century, to the printed-for-the-author scandalous memoirs of the mid-eighteenth century.

While offering a detailed account of a significant period in the rise of a modern literary genre, Origins of the Individualist Self also addresses topics which are central in the fields of literary and cultural theory and social and cultural history.

About the Author:

Michael Mascuch is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley

About this edition

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0804729018
• ISBN 13: 9780804729017
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288