Isolated Cases

by Yousef, Nancy

• ISBN13: 9780801442445
• ISBN10: 0801442443
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-05-01
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

The literature of the romantic period has consistently been seen as the source of modern concepts of the individual. Nancy Yousef maintains, however, that the dominant account of the self in romanticism is in need of profound revision. While individuals presented in central texts of the period are indeed often alone or separated from others, Yousef regards this isolation as a problem the texts attempt to illuminate, rather than a condition they construct as normative or desirable. As her argument moves from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, through both philosophical and literary writing, her book offers a new account of autonomy and of the complex romantic inheritance of enlightenment preoccupations with the origins of human association and the course of human development. In her richly interdisciplinary book, Nancy Yousef addresses the emergence of autonomy, demonstrating that the ideal was beset from its beginnings by profound concerns over the possibilities and grounds of human relations and interdependence. Isolated Cases draws attention to the strain of intersubjective anxieties and longings hidden within representations of the individual as self-sufficient and self-defining. Among the writers and thinkers Yousef treats at length are John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Shelley, and William Wordsworth.

Author Biography

Nancy Yousef is Assistant Professor of English at The City University of New York, Baruch College.

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS	ix
Introduction
CHAPTER 1: Locke's Loneliness	26	(37)
CHAPTER 2: Rousseau's Autonomous Beast: Natural Man as Imaginary Animal	63	(33)
CHAPTER 3: Natural Man in the Wild: The Feral Child as Philosophical Subject	96	(18)
CHAPTER 4: "Unfathered Vapour": The Imagination of Origins in The Prelude	114	(35)
CHAPTER 5: Fantastic Form: Frankenstein and Philosophy	149	(21)
CHAPTER 6: Mill Alone	170	(28)
NOTES	198	(47)
INDEX	245