The chapter explores the ways in which Clare’s sense of personal identity and selfhood is first created, and then fashioned and influenced, by the many differing pressures brought to bear upon it. Such pressures include poetic antecedents, social and economic conditions, literary associations and relationships, as well as the more personal features of an upbringing rooted in the natural world, which is authoritative and confirming, and an internal world, which is increasingly fragile and unstable. The chapter traces these evolutions – from the earliest verse that Clare wrote to the last poems of his asylum years.

Clare had the good fortune to be born into a period of excitement and experimentation in poetry. Ideas about poetry were changing, as were practices of reading and writing. This chapter examines how Clare participated in these changes. He helped to elevate the meditative lyric to the pinnacle of literary prestige by showing how everyday experiences yield pleasure and insight; by using forms with roots in oral and folk cultures, including popular song; and by modelling his poems on the music of nature and the structure of bird nests. He took part in contemporary experiments with form, language, and voice. His poems draw on the philosophical atmosphere of the Romantic age by offering readers opportunities carefully to observe Clare’s world and, by doing so, to come to know it.

This chapter begins by interrogating the ideal of authenticity as a paradigmatic modern response to the crisis of master narratives. It critically examines practices of narrative selfhood, and discusses the ways in which social roles offer scaffolds for the development of a self without fully constituting such a self. Role-playing – the inhabitation of social and narrative roles – is an outstanding example of the exercise of imagination, its double function of finding and making, and its for-the-most-part inherited, moulded, and largely habituated practice. The chapter concludes with a theological discussion of the ways our habitual imagination of selfhood can be broken open without pretence that we might be able to find a fully realized authentic self beneath our narrative and social roles.

This chapter introduces the main topic of this book, inducing intimacy, and explains that the focus is deceptively induced sex and intimate relationships (i.e., sex and sexual and/or romantic relationships). It then sets out the book’s core aims, that is, to examine how the law has responded to inducing intimacy as a form of wrongdoing and source of harms and what can this tell us about the justifiability and desirability of using law to respond to these practices in the present age. The chapter also outlines the scope of the book and the sources used before introducing the theoretical framework that informs the analysis in the remaining chapters, which is based on the cultural significance of sex and marriage, including their significance for self-construction. The chapter closes by outlining the main arguments of the book, including the potential for its historical analysis to inform contemporary debates about whether and how to respond to inducing intimacy via law today.

When attention is paid to the ways characters perform and are performed in anime narratives, it becomes apparent that there are certain regularly utilized approaches to the character acting widespread in anime’s animation. Two of the most prominent modes of performance have been called embodied acting and figurative acting. Each uses distinct techniques to act out a specific character’s personality and, in the process, imply different notions of selfhood. This chapter examines the specific utilization of embodied and figurative acting in Yūri!!! on Ice and how these interrelated modes of performance dovetail with the narrative. Through its balancing of embodied and figurative modes of performance, the anime moves between an individualized self whose interior is expressed externally and an open acknowledgment of the interrelation of external others in the performance of self and gender.

When Lady Philosophy suggests that Boethius’ definition of himself as a rational mortal animal is inadequate, it implies that a superior self-understanding is contained within the Consolation. This chapter argues that this more adequate self-understanding – that Boethius, via participation in God, is himself divine – is implicit in the text and unpacks the profound implications and consolations of this interpretation of the self. Being a rational animal is more than being this specific living thing; it is also an opportunity to manifest divine intelligibility and goodness in the world. The chapter focuses on two perplexing arguments in Book IV that are unsatisfying without this interpretation of Boethius’ identity: that the punished are happier than those who escape punishment and that it is possible to attach ourselves to Providence and escape from Fate. The difficulties that most people will face in accepting these arguments are the direct result of the challenge of adopting this self-interpretation.

The Consolation presents two especially puzzling features that make its exegesis particularly challenging. Literarily, it adopts an uncommon style for a philosophical text, the prosimetrum, which combines prose with poetry. Content-wise, it develops a cogent philosophical message that, perplexingly, is conveyed in a labyrinthine way. These exegetical difficulties disappear if we interpret the Consolation as a form of self-examination grounded in Neoplatonic philosophy. The meandering way in which the text expresses its message illustrates Boethius’ inner conflict brought about by his sudden political fall. The root cause of his conflict is an unresolved tension within the Neoplatonic account of the human soul: the difficulty of reconciling our material self with our divine self. The Consolation’s highly unusual combination of prose and poetry is steeped in some of the basic principles of Neoplatonic pedagogy.

This chapter explores the development of a distinctive Faulknerian ontology in relation to the mimetic information paradigm we have explored. I begin by exploring two characters – Dilsey and Miss Quentin – from The Sound and the Fury who provide a paradigm of autonomous personhood that is able to survive within a coercive plantation network. I extend this analysis to Darl Bundren in As I Lay Dying whose narrative arc vividly evokes both the development and dissolution of the mimetic self. Here, Faulkner anticipates a major theme in a number of his later novels, namely, alienation as a facet of modernity, one that compromises the possibility of sensuous or emotional access to others. Finally, I demonstrate how Sanctuary articulates this mimetic dilemma both in the rape of Temple Drake and on a larger social scale, in the hyper-mimetic quality of information flow through complex social systems that rely more on abstraction than on sensuous interpersonal bonds.

Plato consistently holds that “no one does wrong willingly.” If this is the case, how is it possible for someone to be held morally responsible for his actions? Plato does seem not only to countenance the idea of moral responsibility but to make it a central notion in his political and eschatological writings (Section 5.1). The connection between personhood and embodiment is explored and the relevance of embodiment to moral responsibility is considered in Republic and Timaeus. The possibility of incontinence or akrasia reveals the divided selfhood in the emboodied person. The concept of culpable ignorance is introduced in order to account for moral responsibility. Culpable ignorance depends on the self-relexivity of rationality (Section 5.2).

Diaries are rich but sometimes challenging sources for historians, not least because of their particularity, which can make it difficult to generalize from them. This chapter outlines some of the ways scholars have approached diaries, highlighting the comparative method used by historians such as James Hinton. The relationship between, in Fothergill’s words, ‘the first-person narrator who speaks in the diary and the historical personage who held the pen’ is considered and Huff’s view that we should read diaries as ‘friendly explorers’ endorsed. Questions relating to when, why and for whom a diary may have been written are discussed and the equally important issue of what a diary omits or suppresses. The exceptional potential of long-run, unpublished diaries as source material (as used here) is underlined. Finally this chapter explains the principles on which the diaries on which the book is based were selected and the extent to which they may or may not be representative.

The Introduction interrogates the current critical view of early modern sympathy as a physical or occult process. It proposes that literary critics and historians have neglected the coexistence of the emotional and physical senses of the word sympathy in the early modern period. Exploring a broader range of intellectual frameworks – including religious culture, literary theories of imitation, and humanist pedagogy – complicates the idea that sympathy was primarily an automatic or a humoral phenomenon. The Introduction also argues that translations of European vernacular texts, including Du Bartas’s The Historie of Judith (1584) and Montaigne’s Essais (1603), played a significant role in introducing the affective meaning of sympathy to English readers. This expanding emotional vocabulary – along with other material and social changes in the period – led to an increased theorization of pity and compassion, whereby individuals came to be regarded as a connected network of distinct selves rather than a homogenous social group. In this way, the emergence of sympathy as a term and concept prompted a reconsideration of the nature and boundaries of early modern selfhood.

Pragmatist readings of Kierkegaard, like fideistic readings, treat the conceptual apparatus of faith as all neatly in place: All that’s missing is an act of will (i.e., something other than understanding) to execute the program. But what we actually find in Kierkegaard are new conceptual distinctions. The chapter argues that in The Sickness unto Death, the question of what it means to be a self is answered through a process of abstraction.  Rather than the text motivating us to do more, feel more, or commit more decisively (as we might expect from Kierkegaard), what we "experience" in The Sickness unto Death is an enumeration of conceptual distinctions that enable us to notice more, question more, and reason better – that is, to engage in the kinds of activities normally associated with traditional philosophy. It is argued that the minimal (i.e., “naked”) self described in this text is not something one can experience concretely but rather exists only for abstract reflection.

The Sickness unto Death presents a startlingly modern view of the self as non-substantialist, emergent, and process-driven. Instead of an immaterial soul or metaphysical essence, Kierkegaard’s self is a state of the human body and mind in “synthesis,” something human beings can become (or fail to become) through relating to themselves in a particular way. But the self is also presented in this work as an essentially eschatological being. While the self may be formed in and through its social context, Anti-Climacus returns again and again to the idea that the self is at heart the subject of an eternal judgment. This has significant implications both for what Kierkegaard takes selves – and by extension each of us – to be, and how we understand the temporality within which beings like us live.

Compares Cassirer and Heidegger's take on the human being's capacity to orient itself in the world in a meaningful way. Cassirer's theory of the functions of consciousness, the only meat to his functional conception of human subjectivity, is used to describe the diverse, cultural compasses by means of which the 'symbolic animal' navigates the human world (7.1). Heidegger's accounts of 'the they' and of owned ('authentic') existence in turn provide a theory of Dasein's capacity to orient itself within and towards its world (7.2). In view of their shared interest in orientation, I discern an important distinction for both Cassirer and Heidegger between an orienting and an oriented self. With regard to both, they ultimately disagree about the infinite (cultural) or finite (temporal) nature of the human being (7.3).

This chapter reviews what is known about the interpersonal style of people with antisocial personality and psychopathy, concluding that antisocial individuals have a cold, vindictive and hostile interpersonal style and that they lack the motivation to engage in an empathic way with others. The triarchic view of human selfhood– the self as social actor, as motivated agent and as autobiographical author – is introduced as a framework within which the antisocial individual might be understood from a first-person perspective. So-called dark traits are considered, particularly their role in sexual offending and sexual sadism. It is suggested the ‘dark traits’ construct might be expanded to include paranoia, moral disengagement, spitefulness and greed. The concept of ‘emotion goals’ is introduced and considered in relation to a quadripartite typology of violence that sees violence as reflecting appetitive versus aversive motivation interacting with an impulsive versus controlled dimension.

‘Transport’ was an increasingly complex word in the nineteenth century, linking developments in transport technology to an older sense of being carried away by powerful emotions. This chapter shows how inventively Victorian narrative styles responded to new and established forms of transport, including stagecoach, train and boat, and how much was at stake in those imaginative engagements. Style was a way of responding not only to the rhythms and mechanics of travel but to its many associations, questions about progress and control, challenges to genre and to selfhood, even a rekindling of primal impulses.