William Wordsworth and William Blake are both inheritors of the newly demystified Enlightenment anatomies of the self (Locke, Hume, Hartley), and each of them writes about divisions within the self, and yet each is also partial to older concepts of the soul, less Christian than Gnostic and Neoplatonic. These rival legacies do not simply contradict one another nor exist in tension in the works of these poets, but each of them in his own way draws on both, complementarily, in his exploration of selfhood and of the self's relation to itself. Both are concerned with a certain bewilderment in the self’s relation to the world and to itself. The two different legacies come together particularly for these poets (and this is original to the Romantic concept of self) in the connection they find between a psychology of self-alienation (the self's experience of itself as fragmented) and ‘existential alienation’ (the self's feeling of being homeless in the world or what the Gnostic and Neoplatonic tradition calls ‘the exile of the soul’).

Francis Hutcheson’s first two works, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Virtue and Beauty (1725) and An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections (1728) are to a considerable extent a refutation of the theories of self-interest and self-love developed by Bernard Mandeville, notably in the 1723 edition of The Fable of the Bees. Hutcheson’s attempt to prove the existence of a moral sense and so to defend Shaftesbury against Mandeville’s cynicism regarding the desirability of self-denial and altruistic behaviour, does not deny the existence of self-love as a motivating force in human behaviour, but attempts to subordinate it to the moral sense with which it can be made to work towards general human happiness. This chapter examines Hutcheson’s critique of Mandeville and seeks to show how the debate on self-love raises the issue of the definition of the self, one that Hume would address in the Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40). While more often discussed in the context of Locke’s theory of personal identity and of the sceptical philosophy of Berkeley and Hume, the self is also a central issue of moral philosophy where it functions as a reflexive and relative rather than an absolute entity, thus anchoring it in questions of ethics, social behaviour and religious belief.

The Restoration court painter and poet Anne Killigrew features several written works in her Poems (posthumously published in 1686) explaining her visual artistry in relation to her Christian beliefs, and these poems helped Killigrew to re-define her poetic wit in relation to her spirituality rather than to secularism. Her poems, ‘St. John the Baptist Painted by herself in the Wilderness, with Angels appearing to him, and with a Lamb by him’ and ‘Herodias’s Daughter presenting to her Mother St. John’s Head in a Charger, also Painted by herself,’ accompany the John the Baptist paintings and show Killigrew’s interest in engaging religious ideas in her artistic process. Critics have rightly read Killigrew’s poems in relation to the proto-feminist texts that began to emerge in the period and acknowledge that Killigrew has a distinct and often angry voice in her works about women’s oppression. Anxious to separate her writings from courtly libertine texts, Killigrew looked to religious narratives for inspiration in articulating a self that was both witty and sacred, a unique artistic position in an age where wit was often collapsed with irreligious expressions and outrageous libertinism. This chapter examines that ‘self’ – a spiritual wit – in Killigrew’s verse and the larger implications for the gendered boundaries that women writing in the period negotiated.

The introduction provides a general background to the notion of the self while focusing on the long eighteenth century, and the way writers of the period perceived and expressed the self, and framed their arguments in the domains of literature and philosophy in particular. In so doing it underlines the importance of the elaboration and expression of the self and its recognisably modern identity. It emphasises the decisive contributions of John Locke and David Hume, of Blaise Pascal and Alexander Pope, to a debate on the self that informed the long eighteenth century, contributions which still provide significant elements of the ongoing debates on the self and individualism today. As an overview of the volume’s chapters and arguments, the introduction gives a brief presentation of each of the contributions, sketching out how they constitute at once a patchwork and a chronological narrative, and examine the self from different perspectives related to gender, philosophy, religion, morality and politics, where the protean nature of the self is expressed and explored in different genres and discourses: sermons, poetry, philosophical texts, novels and diaries.

This chapter explores the tensions between individual identity and the collective whole raised both by and within the self-defence testimonies published by radical activists in the French revolutionary era. The particular focus is on a pamphlet published in 1795 by radical editor, Sampson Perry. What is emphasised through this study is the need felt by radical reformers to reassert their individual agency in a climate of persecution. Yet not only did radicals redefine their own sense of self, but they portrayed their individual causes as inseparable from the good of the community. Hence self-defence tracts and speeches were also a way of mobilising support for wider political reform at a time when open criticism of existing institutions could lead to prosecution. Finally, Perry’s direct address to his fellow citizens can be seen as performing some of the changes that reformers hoped to see adopted in the country at large, namely an unmediated form of democratic control of government and a heightened role for the people in decision-making.

Over the course of the seventeenth century, French thought developed a rich and finely textured language of the self. English writers of turn-of-the-century England, and most significantly women, drew on that language in their imitations of the French ‘nouveaux romans’ of the last three decades of the seventeenth century. This provenance explains key features of the representation of self, and of the individual’s interaction with others, that we find in this fiction: the self of self-interest, the empire of passion over reason and the consequent torments only truly experienced by ‘nobler spirits’, and the importance of affective states which escape the perception of the perceiving subject. This chapter demonstrates the importance of this French language and perception of the self to an understanding of the early novelists in a close reading of Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess (1719).

This chapter aims at mapping the female self represented in Samuel Richardson’s first epistolary novel by investigating a possible correlation of spatial situatedness and emotional condition. The changing inside/outside setting, which for Pamela has received little critical attention, reflects the different emotional states of the heroine. In four central scenes the expression of the passions, considered essential for the female self, manifests itself outside the house, whereas its memorising representation – which in the early editions is strikingly indeterminate as to Pamela’s own sensations – transpires inside the closet. Her emotional outbursts occur in the spaciousness and proximity of nature, where she is overwhelmed by sentiment. Similarly, Mr B.’s advances, his confession of love and the marriage proposal take place in a peripatetic outdoor situation: physical movement becomes vital where change is envisaged. Pamela addresses a young woman’s struggle for the acknowledgement of her identity, which she performs and insists on; but while restraint and withdrawal prevail in her conduct the moments of agitation and demonstrative emotionality come to pass during the breakouts from her ‘shell’ or ‘confinement’. The issues addressed also show that the novelistic contention and philosophical debate about ‘individual’ and ‘identity’ are equally topical in Britain around 1740.

This chapter examines the notion of the eighteenth-century male self, at least in its Augustan formulation and constructed by Alexander Pope in his various Dunciads, as a conflicted entity riven by the discourses of gender, physical norms based on classical precedent, the ever-rising middling orders and consumer mercantile capitalism. It takes its cue both from the theory of Bakhtin’s grotesque and classical bodies, subsequently revised by Stallybrass and White’s now seminal Politics and Poetics of Transgression, and more recent critical notions of the historical specificity of the (medical) body in Pope’s own time, when a shift was occurring from the idea of mechanical body to one more centred around the nervous system. Helen Deutsch has productively discussed Pope’s construction of his own body in terms of deformity - one that Pope self-fashioned to his advantage as far as was possible (Resemblance and Disgrace). Here it is argued that Pope displaces his anxieties (consciously or not) about his own masculinity, poetic productivity and physical legitimacy onto a series of alternative selves, either grotesquely monstrous women, or chaotically effeminate men, most notably his poetic alter ego, the poet laureate Colley Cibber.

Johnson and Boswell displayed, both consciously and unconsciously, two very distinctive ways of dealing with their own selves within the period in which they lived. Each reveals, through his written work, just how and where the human mind is known – and not known – by the individual. Johnson’s is a far more deliberate and methodical process, one that approaches, but nevertheless refuses to engage with, those uncertainties and terrors that are as much part of the self as are reason and control. Boswell, perhaps, comes as close as anyone to the two-mindedness of Johnson in some of his descriptions of him. Boswell himself, on the other hand, adopted a far more open and enthusiastic attitude towards his own sense of self – one approaching, at times, even enthusiasm. Suffering, like Johnson, from deep depression, he nevertheless took the opportunity for most of his life to make even his own wretched mental state the subject of scrutiny. Each man, in conclusion, represents something of the major cultural currents of their time, albeit with one looking very much to the past, and one to the future.

This chapter examines the idea of self-love and its development in the published seventeenth-century sermons of Isaac Barrow (1630–77) and John Tillotson (1630–94). The approach is twofold. First, by briefly presenting the idea of passion and self-love in the seventeenth century, the position of both clergymen on this issue is clarified and defined. Second, Barrow’s and Tillotson’s sermons are analysed to show how self-love can be reconciled with religion and obedience to divine law. Finally, by examining Barrow’s and Tillotson’s charity sermons, the way in which both clergymen encouraged ‘mild self-love’ to increase the benefit and happiness of society is illustrated and explored.

Evolutionary biology, in particular evolutionary psychology, has tended to replay some of the arguments about value and motivation that were first debated by the economic psychologists or psychologically oriented economists of the Enlightenment, from Locke to Bentham. The basic point of contention is whether motivation can be reduced to a single (and therefore tautologically selfish) goal – whether pleasure or reproductive success – or whether we ever act on motives that do not reduce to the optimal means of getting what we want. It is possible to stage this debate as an argument between Bernard Mandeville and those like Hume and Adam Smith who wrote in Hutcheson’s wake. Evolutionary game theory has recently shown how second- and third-order motivations – motivations to have or to spurn certain motivations – might evolve; it has had to do so, since the evolution of such higher order motivation is central to human cooperation. Smith and Hume anticipated the ideas of such contemporary economic evolutionary psychologists as Robert Frank and George Ainslie: their insights derive from and cast light on the experience of the literary experience of tragedy, or of the sublime, in which we take pleasure from having our own wishes balked and baffled. The debate between Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson on the death of Cordelia in King Lear instantiates and helpfully clarifies the psychological dynamics of these issues.

In the eighteenth century, the aesthetic quality of the sublime was discussed and thematised by various authors who focused on the relation between the human and the divine, emphasising the creative power of imagination in the aisthesis of the sublime experience. It seems that the interpretation of the sublime displays the limits of the human mind, while also speaking of the possibility of transgressing those limits either in the imaginative functioning or the bodily experience. This chapter, after a thorough introduction, focuses on Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Although the Lockean ‘clear and distinct’ ideas greatly influenced Burke in his philosophical argumentation, John Milton’s poetic impact is emphatically displayed in the ‘dark and obscure’ rhetoric of the work. Discussing the Miltonic obscurity, Burke is able to provide a complex sense not only to the concept but also to the self since he lays special emphasis on the importance of writing the self and reading – the writing and the reading self.