The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature 1640-1770

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.