The making of the modern self : identity and culture in eighteenth-century England
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, a radical change occurred in notions of self and personal identity. This was a 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 demonstrates this 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. He discusses notions of self in the earlier 1700s -- what he terms the ancien régime 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. This unrecognized cultural revolution, the author argues, set the scene for the array of new departures that signaled the onset of Western modernity. Dror Wahrman is associate professor of history at Indiana University (Bloomington)
History
1 online resource (xviii, 414 pages) : illustrations
9780300134599, 9781281734716, 0300134592, 1281734713
236345391
Snapshot: on queen bees and being queens
Varieties of gender in the eighteenth-century England
Gender identities and the limits of cultural history
Climate, civilization and complexion : varieties of race
Wide-angle lens : gender, race, class, and other animals
Bird's-eye view : the eighteenth-century masquerade
The ancien régime of identity
Religion, commerce and empire : enabling contexts of identity's ancien régime
The ancien régime and the revolution
The modern regime of selfhood
The panoramic view : making an example of the French
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