Writing the Self

Download or read book Writing the Self written by Peter Heehs and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-02-14 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named an Outstanding Academic Title of the Year for 2013 by Choice. The self has a history. In the West, the idea of the soul entered Christianity with the Church Fathers, notably Augustine. During the Renaissance the idea of the individual attained preeminence, as in the works of Montaigne. In the 17th century, philosophers such as Descartes formulated notions of self-hood that did not require a divine foundation; in the next century, Hume grew skeptical of the self's very existence. Ideas of the self have changed markedly since the Romantic period and most scholars today regard it as at best a mental construct. First-person genres such as diaries and memoirs have provided an outlet for self-expression. Protestant diaries replaced the Catholic confessional, but secular diaries such as Pepys's may reveal yet more about the self. After Richardson, novels competed with diaries and memoirs as vehicles of self-expression, though memoirs survived and continue to thrive, while the diary has found a new incarnation in the personal blog. Writing the Self narrates the intertwined histories of the self and of self-expression through first-person literature.