Individualism

Individualism: The Cultural Logic of Modernity is an edited collection of sixteen essays on the idea of the modern sovereign individual in the western cultural tradition. Reconsidering the eighteenth-century realist novel, twentieth-century modernism, and underappreciated topics on individualism and literature, this volume provocatively revises and enriches our understanding of individualism as the generative premise of modernity itself.

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'sSilence
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'sBlazing 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 inDialectic 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 inReading "Lolita" in Tehran
Chapter 19 Chapter 16: Re-Orienting the Human: The Esoteric Self