The injunction, 'Know thyself!', resounding down the centuries, has never lost its appeal and urgency. The 'self' remains an abiding and universal concern, something at once intimate, indispensable and elusive; something we take for granted and yet remains difficult to pin down, describe or define. This volume of twelve essays explores how writers in different domains - philosophers and thinkers, novelists, poets, churchmen, political writers and others - construed, fashioned and expressed the self in written form in Great Britain in the course of the long eighteenth century from the Restoration to the period of the French Revolution. The essays are preceded by an introduction that seeks to frame several key aspects of the debate on the self in a succinct and open-minded spirit. The volume foregrounds the coming into being of a recognisably modern self.

IntroductionThe written self - John Baker and Marion Leclair Part I Early modern selves and the Reason v. Passion debate1. Anne Killigrew, a spiritual wit - Laura Alexander2. Charitable though passionate creature: the portrait of Man in late seventeenth-century sermons - Regina Maria Dal Santo3. Self-love in Mandeville and Hutcheson - Jeffrey Hopes4. Fashioning fictional selves from French sources: Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess - Orla Smyth5. The death of Cordelia and the economics of preference in eighteenth-century moral psychology - William Flesch Part II Self-exploration in the Age of Reason: division and continuity6. 'Chaos dark and deep': grotesque selves and self-fashioning in Pope's Dunciad - Clark Lawlor7. In two minds: Johnson, Boswell and representations of the self - Allan Ingram8. 'The Place where my present hopes began to dawn': space, limitation and the perception of female selfhood in Samuel Richardson's Pamela - Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz9. The discursive construction of the self in Shaftesbury and Sterne: Tristram Shandy and the quest for identity - Gioiella Bruni Roccia Part III Romantic wanderings: the self in search of (its) place10. The anxiety of the self and the exile of the soul in Blake and Wordsworth - Laura Quinney11. Transgressing the boundaries of reason: Burke's poetic (Miltonic) reading of the sublime - Eva Antal12. Self and community in radical defence in the French revolutionary era: the example of Oppression!!! The Appeal of Captain Perry to the People of England (1795) - Rachel Rogers BibliographyIndex