The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England

Objects we traditionally regard as mere imitations of the human-dolls, automata, puppets-proliferated in eighteenth-century England’s rapidly expanding market culture. During the same period, there arose a literary genre called the novel that turned the experience of life into a narrated object of psychological plausibility. Park makes a bold intervention in histories of the rise of the novel by arguing that the material objects abounding in eighteenth-century England’s consumer markets worked in conjunction with the novel, itself a commodity fetish, as vital tools for fashioning the modern self. As it constructs a history for the psychology of objects, The Self and It revises a story that others have viewed as originating later: in an age of Enlightenment, things have the power to move, affect people’s lives, and most of all, enable a fictional genre of selfhood. The book demonstrates just how much the modern psyche-and its thrilling projections of artificial life -derive from the formation of the early novel, and the reciprocal activity between made things and invented identities that underlie it.