Description

Composite Selves contributes to studies of the novel rooted in but continuing beyond the eighteenth century by reflecting on the ways in which a broad corpus of German-language novels reveals the self as composite. It uses detailed literary analysis to trace the changing and contingent models of selfhood presented in three clusters of novels: courtly novels from the 1720s and 30s; adventure novels from the 1750s; and sentimental novels of interiority from the 1770s and 80s. Drawing on insights from critical whiteness studies and historical analysis, it illuminates how literary selfhood changes over the century and how even the supposedly 'natural' interior selves of the late eighteenth-century novel are constituted by their encounters with an exterior literary world. Responding to debates over aesthetic education and literary universality that run through humanism, deconstruction, and cognitive literary studies, this project insists on recognizing the socially-turned qualities of novelistic 'selves' and on asking how these qualities relate to groups historically excluded from full selfhood and the social and cultural access that selfhood affords. This book is thus also a story about the construction of literary whiteness in the eighteenth-century novel--a story that fills a notable gap in German literary studies and thus uncovers a missing facet of narratives of the European novel from its earliest phases.