A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Naslovnica
SUNY Press, 24. kol 1993. - Broj stranica: 232
Complementing recent feminist studies of female self-representation, this book examines the dynamics of masculine self-representation in nineteenth-century British literature. Arguing that the category autobiography was a product of nineteenth-century individualism, the author analyzes the dependence of the nineteenth-century masculine subject on autonomy or self-naming as the prerequisite for the composition of a life history. The masculine autobiographer achieves this autonomy by using a feminized other as a metaphorical mirror for the self.

The feminized other in these texts represents the social cost of masculine autobiography. Authors from Wordsworth to Arnold, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Stuart Mill, and Edmund Gosse, use female lovers and family members as symbols for the community with which they feel they have lost contact. In the theoretical introduction, the author argues that these texts actually privilege the autonomous self over the images of community they ostensibly value, creating in the process a self-enclosed and self-referential community of one.
 

Odabrane stranice

Sadržaj

Autobiography and the Loss of Community From Augustines Confessions to Wordsworths The Prelude
39
The Liminal Subject of Romantic Autobiography
67
Romantic AntiAutobiography and Repression
93
From Romantic to Victorian Autobiography
117
Repression and the Split of Subject of Victorian Autobiography
135
Subjected Autonomy in Victorian Autobiography John Stuart Mill and Edmund Gosse
147
Dialogue of the Mind with Itself Matthew Arnold and Monologism
171
Virginia Woolf and the Prison of Consciousness
203
Works Cited
215
Index
227
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