TY - BOOK ID - 77861446 TI - The power of the passive self in English literature, 1640-1770 PY - 2002 SN - 1107125057 0511042124 1280159553 0511120079 0511157037 0511329490 0511484259 051104495X 9780511042126 9780521810050 0521810051 9780511120077 9780511484254 9780511044953 9780511157035 9781280159558 9780521021845 0521021847 PB - Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, DB - UniCat KW - English literature KW - Passivity (Psychology) in literature. KW - Christianity and literature KW - Ethics in literature. KW - Self in literature. KW - Literature and Christianity KW - Literature KW - Christian literature KW - History and criticism. KW - History KW - Arts and Humanities UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77861446 AB - Challenging recent work that contends that seventeenth-century English discourses privilege the notion of a self-enclosed, self-sufficient individual, The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature recovers a counter-tradition that imagines selves as more passively prompted than actively choosing. This tradition - which Scott Paul Gordon locates in seventeenth-century religious discourse, in early eighteenth-century moral philosophy, in mid eighteenth-century acting theory, and in the emergent novel - resists autonomy and defers agency from the individual to an external 'prompter'. Gordon argues that the trope of passivity aims to guarantee a disinterested self in a culture that was increasingly convinced that every deliberate action involves calculating one's own interest. Gordon traces the origins of such ideas 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. ER -