Overview

Composite Selves contributes to studies of the novel rooted in but continuing beyond the eighteenth century by reflecting on the ways in which a broad corpus of German-language novels reveals the self as composite. It uses detailed literary analysis to trace the changing and contingent models of selfhood presented in three clusters of novels: courtly novels from the 1720s and 30s; adventure novels from the 1750s; and sentimental novels of interiority from the 1770s and 80s. Drawing on insights from critical whiteness studies and historical analysis, it illuminates how literary selfhood changes over the century and how even the supposedly 'natural' interior selves of the late eighteenth-century novel are constituted by their encounters with an exterior literary world. Responding to debates over aesthetic education and literary universality that run through humanism, deconstruction, and cognitive literary studies, this project insists on recognizing the socially-turned qualities of novelistic 'selves' and on asking how these qualities relate to groups historically excluded from full selfhood and the social and cultural access that selfhood affords. This book is thus also a story about the construction of literary whiteness in the eighteenth-century novel--a story that fills a notable gap in German literary studies and thus uncovers a missing facet of narratives of the European novel from its earliest phases.

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9780198979814

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Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge is Associate Professor of German at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she has worked since receiving her PhD from Princeton University. Her research interests focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature, particularly the genre of the novel. Her first book, Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel 1795-1830, appeared with Camden House in 2016. She received a Fulbright research grant in 2016. Her articles have appeared in Goethe Yearbook, Monatshefte, Journal of Literary Theory, and Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, among others. Her co-edited collection Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Philosophy appeared with Oxford University Press in 2020.

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