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.
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