| A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain Contributor(s): Danahay, Martin A. (Author) |
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ISBN: 0791415112 ISBN-13: 9780791415115 Publisher: State University of New York Press
Binding Type: Hardcover - See All Available Formats & Editions Published: August 1993 Click for more in this series: Suny Series, the Margins of Literature |
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| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Biography & Autobiography | Political |
| Dewey: B |
| LCCN: 92038402 |
| Series: Suny Series, the Margins of Literature |
| Physical Information: (1.12 lbs) 232 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Complementing recent feminist studies of female self-representation, this book examines the dynamics of masculine self-representation in nineteenth-century British literature. Arguing that the category "autobiography" was a product of nineteenth-century individualism, the author analyzes the dependence of the nineteenth-century masculine subject on autonomy or self-naming as the prerequisite for the composition of a life history. The masculine autobiographer achieves this autonomy by using a feminized other as a metaphorical mirror for the self. The feminized other in these texts represents the social cost of masculine autobiography. Authors from Wordsworth to Arnold, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Stuart Mill, and Edmund Gosse, use female lovers and family members as symbols for the community with which they feel they have lost contact. In the theoretical introduction, the author argues that these texts actually privilege the autonomous self over the images of community they ostensibly value, creating in the process a self-enclosed and self-referential "community of one." |
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