Interpersonal Idiom in Shakespeare, Donne and Early Modern Culture: A Prehistory of the Self

Sixteenth-century English speakers understood identity in radically different terms than ours, Attending to the interpersonally inflected tropes and paradigms of humoratism, visual perception, and sexual constancy. The Interpersonal Ichom elaborates the ways in which early modern usage figures selves as a function of other selves. Nancy Selleck's study challenges the current critical preoccupation with subjectivity, arguing that Shakespeare. Donne, and other early modern writers often emphatically resist emerging conventions of subjective authority and locate selfhood instead in the experience of others. Analyzing a diverse range of texts - from treatises on medicine, faculty psychology, and the controversy over women to drama, poetry, and devotionat literature - Selleck's study proposes a new theoretical understanding of identity in early modern culture.

About the Author:
Nancy Selleck is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell