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Overview
The Social Self reinterprets in an innovative way a central feature of nineteenth-century American culture: the literary representation of selfhood. Taking issue with literary histories that have routinely reduced nineteenth-century culture to simple dichotomies between dominant and oppositional discourses, Joseph Alkana argues that writers such as Hawthorne, Howells, and William James treated ideas about the self with far more complexity than such polarities imply. By showing how these and other nineteenth-century authors handled competing commitments to sociality and the individual consciousness, The Social Self offers an original and provocative reassessment of a fundamental American literary preoccupation and radically revises traditional and recent narratives of American literary culture.Editorials
From the Publisher
"Through intensely close readings of texts, Alkana traces the alternate concept of 'the social self.' In this time of militant groups resistant to conceptions of the self as interdependent from society, the issue is significant." -- Choice
"Dense with fascinating and innovative variations on familiar themes and works. It is well worth the read." -- JASAT
"Alkana freshly examines connections between selfhood and society as he negotiates a conceptual passageway between humanist definitions of selfhood... and poststructuralist claims of a 'new liberation' from the 'tyranny of the philosophical subject." -- South Atlantic Review
"Alkana offers a provocative, alternative reading of the individualist movement in nineteenth-century literary and intellectual circles." -- Year's Work in English Studies
"Alkana's project does identify and explore the ongoing challenge of reconciling our critical and pedagogical methodologies and reminds us that the 'self,' in one form or another, remains central to this enterprise." -- American Literature