Abstract
In this chapter I provide the theoretical and historical background for the Romanticism of the contingent self. Eighteenth-century philosophers were deeply interested in the question whether the self existed. While many philosophers insisted they could prove the existence of the self, others proposed a sceptical view. All, however, explored what it would me to lack a self. The chapter proceeds chronologically, as I explore connections between philosophical arguments in the eighteenth century and portrayals of selfhood in Romantic literature. In Sect. 2.1, I consider the opposing views of John Locke and Mary Astell, who disputed the value of sensation in self-constitution. In Sect. 2.2, I consider the opposing views of Adam Smith and David Hume about the nature of passion. In Sect. 2.3, I show how Kant systematised Rousseau’s doctrine of the will to explain how the necessity of the self can be a choice. In Sect. 2.4, I show how William Hazlitt, Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft explored the construction of the self in language and the imagination. Throughout the discussion, I show how the philosophers developed an understanding of the challenge of representation. In the eighteenth century, philosophers were increasingly perplexed about the meaning of words such as I and self. In the Romantic period, philosophers embarked on a full-blown critique of the language of selfhood, in which some thinkers—notably Hazlitt and Schopenhauer—essentially rejected the language of selfhood altogether. This philosophical analysis of the linguistic construction of the self provides the basis for the digital analysis of language in later chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
Burton R. Pollin, ‘Philosophical and Literary Sources of Frankenstein’, Comparative Literature, 17.2 (1965), 97–108 (p. 98) <https://doi.org/10.2307/1769997>.
- 2.
Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), chap. 6.
- 3.
Wahrman, p. 161.
- 4.
Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement, 1783-1867, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 2000), p. 11. See also Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962), chap. 10.
- 5.
Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 43. See also Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), pp. 75–79.
- 6.
Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), p. 27.
- 7.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 185.
- 8.
Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 471; Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (London: Allen Lane, 2005), pp. 70–71; Raymond Martin and John Barresi, Naturalization of the Soul: Self and Personal Identity in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), chap. 5.
- 9.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, revised edition (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967), p. 464.
- 10.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 58.
- 11.
Foucault, Order of Things, p. 79.
- 12.
Foucault, Order of Things, p. xxv.
- 13.
Numerous scholars have studied the ‘historicisation’ of knowledge in the Romantic period. Erich Auerbach claims that ‘historism’ is the defining feature of Romantic literature, while other scholars have shown how linguistics (Aarsleff), childbirth (Henderson), biology (Gigante) and aesthetics (Halmi) were historicised in the Romantic period: Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. by Willard R. Trask (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003), chap. 17; Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780-1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 127ff; Andrea Henderson, Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chap. 1; Denise Gigante, Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009); Nicholas Halmi, ‘Romanticism, the Temporalization of History, and the Historicization of Form’, Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History, 74 (2013), 363–89. See also: Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998).
- 14.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Allan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977), p. 160.
- 15.
‘Far and away the key philosopher in this modern mould,’ according to Porter, Enlightenment, p. 60.
- 16.
Scholars focus in particular on Astell’s rationalist critique of Lockean materialism, and on her feminist critique of his theory of the social contract: Kathleen M Squadrito, ‘Mary Astell’s Critique of Locke’s View of Thinking Matter’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 25.3 (1987), 433–39 <https://doi.org/10.1353/hph.1987.0053>; Patricia Springborg, ‘Mary Astell (1666-1731), Critic of Locke’, The American Political Science Review, 89.3 (1995), 621–33 <https://doi.org/10.2307/2082978>; Jacqueline Broad, ‘Mary Astell on Marriage and Lockean Slavery’, History of Political Thought, 35.4 (2014), 717–38.
- 17.
Sowaal and Broad in particular defend Astell’s sophisticated philosophy of mind, and her associated epistemology: Alice Sowaal, ‘Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal: Mind, Method, and Custom’, Philosophy Compass, 2.2 (2007), 227–43 <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00071.x>; Alice Sowaal, ‘Mary Astell’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2015 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2015) <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/entries/astell/> [accessed 22 July 2020]; Jacqueline Broad, ‘Selfhood and Self-Government in Women’s Religious Writings of the Early Modern Period’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 27.5 (2019), 713–30 <https://doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2019.1663234>.
- 18.
John Locke, The Educational Writings of John Locke, ed. by James L. Axtell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 259–60.
- 19.
Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest. In Two Parts, 4th edn, 2 vols (London: Richard Wilkin, 1701), i, p. 48.
- 20.
Astell, Serious Proposal, ii, p. 128.
- 21.
Astell, Serious Proposal, i, p. 29. Elsewhere Astell describes how ill-education ‘discomposing and dissolving the mind, and making it uncapable of any manner of good’: Mary Astell, Some Reflections Upon Marriage, 2nd edn (London: Richard Wilkin, 1703), p. 16.
- 22.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 525.
- 23.
Locke, Educational Writings, p. 184.
- 24.
Locke, Educational Writings, p. 188.
- 25.
Astell, Serious Proposal, ii, p. 79.
- 26.
Astell, Serious Proposal, ii, p. 79.
- 27.
Astell, Serious Proposal, i, p. 65.
- 28.
Astell, Serious Proposal, ii, p. 119.
- 29.
Astell, Serious Proposal, i, p. 65.
- 30.
Astell, Serious Proposal, ii, p. 114.
- 31.
Locke, Essay, pp. 105–6,118. See Etienne Balibar, Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness, trans. by Warren Montag (London and New York: Verso, 2013), pp. 52–54.
- 32.
Astell, Some Reflections, p. 59.
- 33.
Sowaal, ‘Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal’, pp. 231–32.
- 34.
Astell, Serious Proposal, pp. 215–17. See Sowaal, ‘Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal’, pp. 228–31.
- 35.
Astell, Serious Proposal, ii, p. 31.
- 36.
Astell, Serious Proposal, i, p. 73, II, p. 20.
- 37.
Astell, Serious Proposal, ii, p. 66.
- 38.
Locke, Essay, pp. 394–401. He discusses the problem again in the Conduct: Locke, Educational Writings, pp. 252–54. Edgeworth was not the first novelist to draw on this chapter from Locke; the famous joke about the clock in Tristram Shandy derives from the same source.
- 39.
Locke, Essay, pp. 387–98.
- 40.
Maria Edgeworth, Harrington, A Tale; and Ormond, A Tale, 3 vols (London: R. Hunter, 1817), i, p. 3.
- 41.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works, ed. by Kathleen Coburn, 16 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), vii, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate (1983), pp. 52–53.
- 42.
Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793. (Philadelphia: Maxwell, 1799), p. 141.
- 43.
‘The World is Too Much With Us’, ll. 1–4 in William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. by Thomas Hutchinson and Ernest De Selincourt (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 206.
- 44.
‘To the Mountain Winds’, ll. 21–24, in Felicia Hemans, Works of Mrs. Hemans, with a Memoir by Her Sister, ed. by Harriett Browne, 7 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1839), vi, pp. 234–235.
- 45.
Locke, Essay, p. 335.
- 46.
Astell, Serious Proposal, ii, pp. 47, 20.
- 47.
Locke, Essay, p. 341.
- 48.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 251, 354.
- 49.
Hume, Treatise, p. 262.
- 50.
Hume, Treatise, pp. 1–3.
- 51.
Hume, Treatise, p. 251.
- 52.
Hume, Treatise, p. 14.
- 53.
Hume, Treatise, p. 252.
- 54.
Hume, Treatise, p. 277.
- 55.
Hume, Treatise, pp. 252, 277.
- 56.
Hume, Treatise, p. 10.
- 57.
Hume, Treatise, pp. 260–61.
- 58.
Hume later disavowed this theory of the self’s construction. The ideas in the mind are too various and too distinct to be ‘associated’ by the imagination in this way. He was reduced to a ‘sceptical’ position, claiming that he could still see no justification for the idea of the simple or identical self, and no justification for the complex or composed self either! Hume, Treatise, p. 636.
- 59.
Hume, Treatise, p. 277.
- 60.
Hume, Treatise, p. 317.
- 61.
Deleuze captures this nicely: ‘But the qualities of passion do not fix the imagination in the same way as the modes of association [i.e. of the understanding]. These [modes of association] give ideas possible reciprocal relations, those [qualities of passion] give a direction, a sense to those relations, attribute a reality to them, a univocal movement, and therefore a first term’. Gilles Deleuze, Empirisme et Subjectivité (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2007), p. 57.
- 62.
Étienne Bonnot Condillac, Traité Des Sensations (n.pl.: Fayard, 1984), pp. 157–219.
- 63.
Denis Diderot, ‘Le Rêve De D’Alembert’, quoted in Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 162.
- 64.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. by Ryan Patrick Hanley (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 133.
- 65.
Adam Smith, Moral Sentiments, pp. 135–36.
- 66.
Adam Smith, Moral Sentiments, p. 14.
- 67.
Adam Smith, Moral Sentiments, p. 16.
- 68.
Adam Smith, Moral Sentiments, p. 30. He also uses the phrases ‘self-government’ and ‘self-command’ to refer to this concept.
- 69.
Adam Smith, Moral Sentiments, p. 168.
- 70.
Hume, Treatise, p. 407.
- 71.
David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. by L. A. Selby-Bigge and Peter H. Nidditch, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 172.
- 72.
Hume, Treatise, p. 470.
- 73.
Hume, Treatise, p. 403.
- 74.
Hume, Treatise, p. 403. Emphasis added.
- 75.
Above, p. 3.
- 76.
Hume, Treatise, p. 608.
- 77.
Hume, Enquiries, p. 270.
- 78.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus [The 1818 Text], ed. by Marilyn Butler (Oxford: OUP, 1998), p. 78.
- 79.
The Romantic ‘attack on sensibility’ has been extremely widely studied. See for instance: Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), chap. 8; Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790-1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 3, 7–8, 24, 27; Claire Knowles, Sensibility and Female Poetic Tradition, 1780–1860: The Legacy of Charlotte Smith (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2010), chap. 1.
- 80.
Adam Smith, Moral Sentiments, p. 177.
- 81.
Charlotte Smith, The Poems, ed. by Stuart Curran (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 223.
- 82.
William Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. by David Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1988), pp. 26, 46, 49.
- 83.
Adam Smith, Moral Sentiments, pp. 63–66.
- 84.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776), ii, pp. 83, 366. See also Seigel, pp. 153–54.
- 85.
On the distinction between ‘combat’ and ‘constitution’ models of the soul, see Christine M. Korsgaard, Self-Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), chap. 7.
- 86.
Taylor, p. 344.
- 87.
Hume, Treatise, p. 252.
- 88.
Rebecca Kukla, ‘Making and Masking Human Nature: Rousseau’s Aesthetics of Education’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 29.3 (1998), 228–51 (p. 228) <https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.1998.11008529>.
- 89.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: Or, on Education, trans. by Allan Bloom (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 42.
- 90.
Taylor, p. 361.
- 91.
In a classic study that retains its freshness, René Wellek shows just how poorly Kant was understood in England before translations of his major works began to appear in the 1830s: René Wellek, Immanuel Kant in England, 1793-1838 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931).
- 92.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract; and the Discourses, ed. by G. D. H. Cole, Everyman’s Library (London: Dent, 1955), p. 16.
- 93.
Christine M. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 40.
- 94.
Kukla, p. 229.
- 95.
Kukla, p. 231.
- 96.
Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. by Mary J. Gregor, trans. by Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 66.
- 97.
‘Critique of Practical Reason’, in Kant, Practical Philosophy, p. 166.
- 98.
Kant, Practical Philosophy, p. 154.
- 99.
Rousseau, Emile, pp. 63, 85, 67, 160.
- 100.
Rousseau, Emile, p. 472.
- 101.
Rousseau, Emile, p. 67.
- 102.
Rousseau, Emile, pp. 213–14. Translation slightly modified.
- 103.
Rousseau, Social Contract and Discourses, p. 237.
- 104.
Rousseau, Social Contract and Discourses, p. 238.
- 105.
This distinction is the central theme in Kant’s chapter ‘On the incentives of pure practical reason’ in the second Critique: Kant, Practical Philosophy, pp. 198–211.
- 106.
Kant, Practical Philosophy, p. 200.
- 107.
‘On a supposed right to lie from philanthrophy’, in Kant, Practical Philosophy, p. 612.
- 108.
See the discussion in the Groundwork: Kant, Practical Philosophy, p. 74. Also generally Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends, pp. 77–105.
- 109.
‘… je continuerai quoi qu’ils fassent d’être en depit d’eux ce que je suis’. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres Complètes, 5 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), i, p. 1080.
- 110.
‘… Tout est sur la terre dans un flux continuel qui ne permet à rien d’y prendre une forme constante. Tout change autour de nous. Nous changeons nous-mêmes et nul ne peut s’assurer qu’il aimera demain ce qu’il aime aujourd’hui.’ Rousseau, Œuvres Complètes, i, p. 1085.
- 111.
‘J’appliquerai le baromettre à mon ame, … Je me contenterai de tenir le registre des operations [de mon ame] sans chercher à les reduire en systême.’ Rousseau, Œuvres Complètes, i, pp. 1000–01.
- 112.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 259.
- 113.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 257–59.
- 114.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 259.
- 115.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 260.
- 116.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 247–48.
- 117.
Kant sets out this argument rather elaborately when he resolves the ‘third conflict’ of the ‘Antinomy of Pure Reason’: Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 532–46.
- 118.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 246ff.
- 119.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 260.
- 120.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 260.
- 121.
Anna Seward, Original Sonnets on Various Subjects; and Odes Paraphrased from Horace (London: Sael, 1799), p. 96.
- 122.
‘Es gibt nur eine Ursache des Übels—die allgemeine Schwäche—und diese Schwäche ist nichts als geringe Sittliche Empfänglichkeit und Mangel an Reiz der Freiheit.’ Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Hymnen an Die Nacht Und Geistliche Lieder, ed. by James Boyd (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949), p. 167.
- 123.
Thomas De Quincey, The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Everyman’s Library (London and New York: Dent and Dutton, 1907), p. 232.
- 124.
‘Sonnet: Political Greatness’, ll. 10–11, in Percy Shelley, Poetical Works, ed. by Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 642.
- 125.
‘The Cloud’, ll. 73–76, in Percy Shelley, p. 602.
- 126.
The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, trans. by Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 81.
- 127.
Roger Cardinal, ‘Romantic Travel’, in Rewriting the Self : Histories from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. by Roy Porter (London: Taylor and Francis, 2002), pp. 135–55 (p. 135).
- 128.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (London: Joseph Johnson, 1792), p. 135.
- 129.
Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 201.
- 130.
Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 96.
- 131.
Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 92.
- 132.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 4 vols (London: Johnson, 1798), i, p. 176.
- 133.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (London: Joseph Johnson, 1796), p. 66.
- 134.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event. In a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris. (London: Dodsley, 1790), p. 162.
- 135.
Burke, p. 130.
- 136.
Burke, p. 143.
- 137.
Burke, pp. 130, 272–73.
- 138.
See James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), chap. 4.
- 139.
Hume, Treatise, pp. 484–501.
- 140.
Burke, p. 8.
- 141.
William Hazlitt, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action: Being an Argument in Favour of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind. To Which Are Added, Some Remarks on the Systems of Hartley and Helvetius (London: Johnson, 1805), p. 2.
- 142.
Hazlitt, p. 20.
- 143.
Hazlitt, p. 118.
- 144.
Hazlitt, pp. 119–20.
- 145.
See Martin and Barresi, pp. 138–48; Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, pp. 369–71; Wahrman, p. 273.
- 146.
Rousseau, Emile, p. 230.
References
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Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, revised edition (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967)
Astell, Mary, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest. In Two Parts, 4th edn, 2 vols (London: Richard Wilkin, 1701)
———, Some Reflections Upon Marriage, 2nd edn (London: Richard Wilkin, 1703)
Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. by Willard R. Trask (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003)
Balibar, Etienne, Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness, trans. by Warren Montag (London and New York: Verso, 2013)
Blake, William, Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. by David Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1988)
Briggs, Asa, The Age of Improvement, 1783-1867, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 2000)
Broad, Jacqueline, ‘Mary Astell on Marriage and Lockean Slavery’, History of Political Thought, 35.4 (2014), 717–38
———, ‘Selfhood and Self-Government in Women’s Religious Writings of the Early Modern Period’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 27.5 (2019), 713–30 <https://doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2019.1663234>
Brown, Charles Brockden, Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793. (Philadelphia: Maxwell, 1799)
Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event. In a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris. (London: Dodsley, 1790)
Cardinal, Roger, ‘Romantic Travel’, in Rewriting the Self : Histories from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. by Roy Porter (London: Taylor and Francis, 2002), pp. 135–55
Chandler, James, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998)
———, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984)
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Collected Works, ed. by Kathleen Coburn, 16 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971)
Condillac, Étienne Bonnot, Traité Des Sensations (n.pl.: Fayard, 1984)
De Quincey, Thomas, The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Everyman’s Library (London and New York: Dent and Dutton, 1907)
Deleuze, Gilles, Empirisme et Subjectivité (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2007)
Edgeworth, Maria, Harrington, A Tale; and Ormond, A Tale, 3 vols (London: R. Hunter, 1817)
Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Allan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977)
———, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002)
Giddens, Anthony, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1991)
Gigante, Denise, Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009)
Halmi, Nicholas, ‘Romanticism, the Temporalization of History, and the Historicization of Form’, Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History, 74 (2013), 363–89
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Henderson, Andrea, Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
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———, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. by L. A. Selby-Bigge and Peter H. Nidditch, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)
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———, Practical Philosophy, ed. by Mary J. Gregor, trans. by Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Knowles, Claire, Sensibility and Female Poetic Tradition, 1780–1860: The Legacy of Charlotte Smith (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2010)
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———., Self-Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
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———, The Educational Writings of John Locke, ed. by James L. Axtell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968)
Lynch, Deidre Shauna, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998)
Martin, Raymond, and John Barresi, Naturalization of the Soul: Self and Personal Identity in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)
Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Hymnen an Die Nacht Und Geistliche Lieder, ed. by James Boyd (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949)
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———, Flesh in the Age of Reason (London: Allen Lane, 2005)
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———, Œuvres Complètes, 5 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1959)
———, The Social Contract; and the Discourses, ed. by G. D. H. Cole, Everyman’s Library (London: Dent, 1955)
Seigel, Jerrold, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
Seward, Anna, Original Sonnets on Various Subjects; and Odes Paraphrased from Horace (London: Sael, 1799)
Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus [The 1818 Text], ed. by Marilyn Butler (Oxford: OUP, 1998)
Shelley, Percy, Poetical Works, ed. by Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970)
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Falk, M. (2024). Philosophy: Eighteenth-Century Theories of Contingent Selfhood. In: Romanticism and the Contingent Self. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49959-3_2
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