Centring the Self: Subjectivity, Society, and Reading from Thomas Gray to Thomas Hardy

These essays focus primarily on the theme of selfhood and subjective experience in the poetry of the British Romantic period, and in the later poetry and novels that were its legacy. There are chapters on Gray, Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Hardy and George Eliot - writers who, though often having a strong interest in public affairs, all turned inwards to make trial of imagination and the individual life as sources of order and value against a background of cultural unsettlement. The book moves from the emergence of post-Enlightenment psychological man to the proto-modernist preoccupation with the self as construct in Byron and Hardy.