The making of the modern self

About this book

"Toward the end of the eighteenth century, a radical change occurred in notions of self and personal identity. This was sudden transformation, says Dror Wahrman, and nothing short of a revolution in the understanding of selfhood and of identity categories including race, gender, and class. In this pathbreaking book, he offers a fundamentally new interpretation of this critical turning point in Western history." "Wahrman takes us on a panoramic voyage through English culture in pursuit of the historical origins of modern concepts of identity and self. He demonstrates their transformation with a fascinating variety of cultural evidence from eighteenth-century England, from theater to beekeeping, fashion to philosophy, art to travel and translations of the classics. Wahrman describes notions about self in the earlier 1700s - what he terms the "ancien regime of identity"--That seem bizarre, even incomprehensible, to present-day readers. He then examines how this peculiar world came to an abrupt end and the far-reaching consequences of that change. In the process he reinterprets such familiar phenomena as Romanticism, the birth of class, the rise of feminism, and the language of natural rights. Wahrman posits a previously unrecognized cultural revolution, one that set the scene for an array of new departures signaling the onset of Western modernity."--Jacket.