Individualism

Edited by Zubin Meer - Contributions by Nancy Armstrong; Deborah Cook; James Cruise; Lisa Eck; Megan Heffernan; David Jenemann; Nigel Joseph; Tom McCall; Lucy McNeece; JoAnne Myers; Julie Orlemanski; Jonathon Penny; Dale Shin; Vivasvan Soni; Frederick Tur

Individualism: The Cultural Logic of Modernity explores ideas of the modern sovereign individual in the western cultural tradition. Divided into two sections, this volume surveys the history of western individualism in both its early and later forms: chiefly from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and then individualism in the twentieth century. These essays boldly challenge not only the exclusionary framework and self-assured teleology, but also the metaphysical certainty of that remarkably tenacious narrative on "the rise of the individual." Some essays question the correlation of realist characterization to the eighteenth-century British novel, while others champion the continuing political relevance of selfhood in modernist fiction over and against postmodern nihilism. Yet others move to the foreground underappreciated topics, such as the role of courtly cultures in the development of individualism. Taken together, the essays provocatively revise and enrich our understanding of individualism as the generative premise of modernity itself. Authors especially considered include Locke, Defoe, Freud, and Adorno. The essays in this volume first began as papers presented at a conference of the American Comparative Literature Association held at Princeton University. Among the contributors are Nancy Armstrong, Deborah Cook, James Cruise, David Jenemann, Lucy McNeece, Vivasvan Soni, Frederick Turner, and Philip Weinstein.

Chapter 1 Introduction: Individualism Revisited Part 2 Part 1: Individualism in Early Modernity Chapter 3 Chapter 1: A Silence in the Family Tree: The Genealogical Subject in Heldris of Cornwall's Silence Chapter 4 Chapter 2: Shakespeare's Polycentric Marketplace: Why the Individual and the Community Need Not Be at Odds Chapter 5 Chapter 3: "A World of My Own Creating": Private Worlds and Social Selves in Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World Chapter 6 Chapter 4: Secrecy and Spies: London, 1650-1800 Chapter 7 Chapter 5: Infectious Fictions in A Journal of the Plague Year: Defoe and the Empirical Self Chapter 8 Chapter 6: The Other Side of Modern Individualism: Locke and Defoe Chapter 9 Chapter 7: Locke's Disciplined Self: A Postcolonial Perspective Chapter 10 Chapter 8: The Tragedies of Sentimentalism: Privatizing Happiness in the Eighteenth Century Part 11 Part 2: Individualism in Late Modernity Chapter 12 Chapter 9: Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction Chapter 13 Chapter 10: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Apocalypse of Self in the Modern Novel Chapter 14 Chapter 11: Camouflage Work: Precisionist Painting and the Hidden Subject of Modernism Chapter 15 Chapter 12: The Precarious Subject of Late Capitalism: Rereading Adorno on the "Liquidation" of Individuality Chapter 16 Chapter 13: The Encrypted Individual in Dialectic of Enlightenment Chapter 17 Chapter 14: The Rise and Decline of the Individual in Adorno: Exit Hamlet, Enter Hamm Chapter 18 Chapter 15: The Individual as Cheshire Cat in Reading "Lolita" in Tehran Chapter 19 Chapter 16: Re-Orienting the Human: The Esoteric Self