Negotiating individualism: Apologies, social contracts, and the romantic making of the self

"Negotiating Individualism: Apologies, Social Contracts, and the Romantic Making of the Self" argues that a central mechanism for the formation of our modern identity is the ritual of the apology. This is because as a speech act the apology always involves a recognition of the notion of contract upon which depends much of what we think of as modern about society. According to the view I advance here our understanding of our sense of individualism is based on a negotiation between the personal language of the apology and those collective ideals embodied in the social contract.;I argue that our transition from an ancient world of fixed social position to our contemporary, more fluid view of ourselves depended on a movement from social coercion to collective agreement and from the rule of physical force to that of persuasive language. This social change depended first upon reconceiving of ourselves in imaginary terms as persons of equal power, and second on the construction of narratives that helped model our newly reimagined selves. These narratives required the use of a new sort of persuasive language--the literary apology. Literary apologies helped construct our modern self because structurally they were contractual offerings--proposals for negotiation and linguistic agreement. Writers of imaginative literature used such literary apologies to habituate readers to the idea of a social contract and to the political equality and individual rights that the contract inherently assumed.;After a conceptual and historical overview in the Introduction, the first chapter takes up Hobbes' Leviathan as that form of the social contract ultimately productive of the modern self. The contract Hobbes establishes requires an individual act of forgiveness as one of the preconditions for the establishment of his social contract. Chapter Two shows how in his Confessions Jean-Jacques Rousseau rewrites the Hobbesian social contract by converting this passive idea of forgiveness into the active form of the apology. Chapter Three, on William Godwin's Caleb Williams, analyses the apology's subsequent evolution from an external in-the-world act, to its literary form. In my final chapter I show how Jane Austen, as an inheritor of the literary apology, is able to use it to bring women into being as politically viable entities.