My topic is a certain textual inscription of the self in the second half of the seventeenth century. The experience of history as progress, proclaimed by Bacon and demonstrated by technological advances that were changing the economics of agriculture, marks the birth, in the seventeenth century, of the modern conception of the self as at once coherent and unified, yet developing, as capable of making and being made by history. In the third book of Paradise Lost, Milton has the Father describe Adam and Eve as “authors to themselves in all / Both what they judge and what they choose.” This use of writing as a model for the structure of the self-information reflects a conception of history as a progress of second causes inscribed within a providential design. My book studies how the narrative form of Paradise Lost projects this new concept of the historical self through a dialectic that locates the narrated events at the intersection of prospective and retrospective points of view.

The notion that the modern conception of the individual was born in the Renaissance has long been a scholarly commonplace. Recent studies have described the textual traces of this birth in sixteenth-century English literature and have begun to outline in some detail the stages of its gestation. Stephen Greenblatt has described the appearance in sixteenth-century texts of the self as an object to be fashioned by an interior subject and submitted to a world of external forces, and Anne Ferry has charted the development of a vocabulary of “inwardness” with which this new self, composed of an authentic interior and an always inadequate outward expression, began to be explored in sixteenth-century sonnets.