HIST 358: The Self before the Selfie (HC): Self, Identity and the Senses

"This book is the first to examine the meaning encoded in the very form of caricature, and to explain its rise as a consequence of the emergence of modernity, especially the modern self."--BOOK JACKET.

"How should we live? That question was no less urgent for English men and women who lived between the early sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries than for this book's readers. Keith Thomas's exploration of the ways in which people sought to lead fulfilling lives in the period between the beginning of the Reformation and the heyday of the Enlightenment illuminates the central values of the age, while casting incidental light on some of the perennial problems of human existence." "The Ends of Life offers a fresh approach to the history of early modern England, by one of the foremost historians of our time. It also provides modern readers with much food for thought on the problem of how we should live and what goals in life we should pursue."--BOOK JACKET.

Porter traces the course of man's philosophical journey from the superstitious, spiritually obsessed Dark Ages to our modern perspective. He demonstrates how the explosion of rational thought and scientific innovation during the Enlightenment began to change our understanding of the flesh and its relation to the soul. No longer simply a "mortal coil," the body eventually became the location, and source, of our conscious selves. Porter examines this paradigm shift through the eyes of the great thinkers of history, from Descartes to Voltaire to Lord Byron, summarizing and explicating their beliefs.

This second volume in the History of Emotions, edited by Alain Corbin, concerns the Enlightenment and the 19th century. From the middle of the eighteenth century new expectations emerged. The notion of "sensitive soul" emerges little by little. It is the time of the diary and the feeling of wonder amidst Nature. A meteorological "me" emerges, sensitive to the vagaries of natural phenomena. In this century of the Revolution and revolutions, anger, terror, indignation rub shoulders with exaltation, joy, fervor or melancholy on the political scene. New rituals express them and give them body. From barricades to battlefields, from great hunts to natural disasters, from romanticism to Impressionism multiple ranges of emotions are highlighted here.

"Toward the end of the eighteenth century, a radical change occurred in notions of self and personal identity. This was sudden transformation, says Dror Wahrman, and nothing short of a revolution in the understanding of selfhood and of identity categories including race, gender, and class. In this pathbreaking book, he offers a fundamentally new interpretation of this critical turning point in Western history." "Wahrman takes us on a panoramic voyage through English culture in pursuit of the historical origins of modern concepts of identity and self. He demonstrates their transformation with a fascinating variety of cultural evidence from eighteenth-century England, from theater to beekeeping, fashion to philosophy, art to travel and translations of the classics. Wahrman describes notions about self in the earlier 1700s - what he terms the "ancien regime of identity" - that seem bizarre, even incomprehensible, to present-day readers. He then examines how this peculiar world came to an abrupt end and the far-reaching consequences of that change. In the process he reinterprets such familiar phenomena as Romanticism, the birth of class, the rise of feminism, and the language of natural rights. Wahrman posits a previously unrecognized cultural revolution, one that set the scene for an array of new departures signaling the onset of Western modernity."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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Through extensive readings in philosophical, legal, medical, and imaginative writing, this book explores notions and experiences of being a person from European antiquity to Descartes. It offers quite new interpretations of what it was to be a person--to experience who-ness--in other times and places, involving new understandings of knowing, willing, and acting, as well as of political and material life, the play of public and private, passions and emotions. The trajectory the author reveals reaches from the ancient sense of personhood as set in a totality of surroundings inseparable from the person, to an increasing sense of impermeability to the world, in which anger has replaced love in affirming a sense of self. The author develops his analysis through an impressive range of authors, languages, and texts: from Cicero, Seneca, and Galen; through Avicenna, Hildegard of Bingen, and Heloise and Abelard; to Petrarch, Montaigne, and Descartes.

Naturalization of the Soul charts the development of the concepts of soul and self in Western thought, from Plato to the present. It fills an important gap in intellectual history by being the first book to emphasize the enormous intellectual transformation in the eighteenth century, when the religious 'soul' was replaced first by a philosophical 'self' and then by a scientific 'mind'.

The eleven essays selected for this volume--nine making their first appearance in English--are drawn from Lejeune's four major studies. Le Pacte autobiographique (1975), Lire Leiris, autobiographique et language (1975), Je est un autre (1980), and Moi aussi (1986). Together, they give the reader an overview of his development as a critic of autobiography and address a wide range of problems.

In this volume a team of international contributors explore the way modern conceptions of what constitutes an individual's life-story emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Enlightenment idea of the self - an autonomous individual, testing rules imposed from without against a personal sensibility nourished from within - is today vigourously contested. By analysing early modern 'life writing' in all its variety, from private diaries and correspondence to public confessions and philosophical portraits, this volume shows that the relation between self and community is more complex and more intimate than supposed. Spanning the period from the end of the Renaissance to the eve of Romanticism in western Europe, a period in which the explosion of print culture afforded unprecedented opportunities for the circulation of life-stories from all classes, this book examines the public assertion of self by men and women in England, France and Germany from the Renaissance to Romanticism.

Among Jean-Jacques Rousseau's chief preoccupations was the problem of self-interest implicit in all social relationships. A person with divided loyalties (i.e., to both himself and his cohorts) was, in Rousseau's thinking, a divided person. Warner traces his argument through the contours of Rousseau's thought on three distinct types of relationships-sexual love, friendship, and civil or political association. Warner concludes that none of these, whether examined individually or together, provides a satisfactory resolution to the problem of human dividedness located at the center of Rousseau's thought.

In England from the 1670s to the 1820s a transformation took place in how smell and the senses were viewed. The role of smell in developing medical and scientific knowledge came under scrutiny. Using a range of sources from diaries, letters, and sanitary records to satirical prints, consumer objects, and magazines, Tullett traces how individuals and communities perceived the smells around them, from paint and perfume to onions and farts. Smell in Eighteenth-Century England is not a tale of the medicalization and deodorization of English olfactory culture, but rather a recognition of smell's asocial-sociability, and its capacity to create atmospheres of uncomfortable intimacy, that transformed the relationship between the senses and society.

The notion of ‘selfhood’ conjures up images of self-sufficiency, integrity, introspectiveness, and autonomy – characteristics typically associated with ‘modernity.’ The seventeenth century marks the crucial transition to a new form of ‘bourgeois’ selfhood, although the concept goes back to the pre-modern and early modern period. A richly interdisciplinary collection, Space and Self integrates perspectives from history, history of literature, and history of art to link the issue of selfhood to the new and vital literature on space. As Space and Self shows, there have at all times been multiple paths and alternative possibilities for forming identities, marking personhood, and experiencing life as a concrete, singular individual. Positioning self and space as specific and evolving constructs, a diverse group of contributors explore how persons become embodied in particular places or inscribed in concrete space. Space and Self thus sets the terms for current discussion of these topics and provides new approaches to studying their cultural specificity.

The second half of the eighteenth century brought important changes in attitudes towards shaping the body. New expectations of polite conduct, deportment and demeanour were projected onto the body, with emphasis laid upon neatness, elegance and a 'natural' body shape. Deformities were to be concealed, whilst bodily surfaces were managed to convey a harmonious whole. A large number of 'technologies of the body' were involved in this process, including wooden legs, elastic trusses, and even wigs. But the introduction of a new type of steel - cast steel - around 1750, offered new material possibilities for shaping the body.