The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England

(Stanford University Press) In this book, Park discusses the rise of objects that imitate the human form – dolls, automata, puppets – and the development of the novel in18th-century England. Claiming that the material objects proliferating in consumer markets worked in conjunction with the novel to fashion the modern self, she argues that in this age of Enlightenment things had the power to affect people’s lives and enable a fictional genre of selfhood. She derives the beginnings of the modern psyche, and its projections of ‘artificial life,’ from the formation of the early novel and the underlying reciprocal activity between made things and invented identities. Park is an assistant professor of English at Vassar College.