{"product_id":"the-power-of-the-passive-self-in-english-literature-1640-1770","title":"The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640–1770","description":"\u003cp\u003eChallenging 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Cambridge University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46646389833966,"sku":"9780521021845","price":52.34,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0630\/9612\/7726\/files\/9780521021845.jpg?v=1750153946","url":"https:\/\/bookland.com.au\/products\/the-power-of-the-passive-self-in-english-literature-1640-1770","provider":"Book Land AU","version":"1.0","type":"link"}