The paper analyzes a number of cultural patterns of individualism since the late nineteenth century to our times, taking into account its national and gender variants and patterns of conflict and violence. It argues that the liberal New Women literature, especially written by women, opted not so much for independence, with its emphasis on self-affirmation, as for autonomy, which also valorized relationships and shared goals. The technological revolution, which promoted the rise of mass societies, and the current Information Age, in which political freedom risks transforming itself into market democracy and respect for individuality into a cult of “recombinance,” have produced types of self-affirmation that actually tend to come full circle to submerging individuality in social environment. Professor Regenia Gagnier is a critical theorist and cultural historian of 19th-century Britain. Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, she was a Professor of English, Director of Graduate Studies in English, and Director of the Programme in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University from 1982 to 1996, and Professor of English, Director of Research, Dean of the Graduate School, and Director of Exeter Interdisciplinary Institute at the University of Exeter since 1996. Her books include Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, 1986), Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832-1920 (Oxford, 1991), Critical Essays on Oscar Wilde (Boston, 1991), The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago, 2000), Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: on the Relationship of Part to Whole 1859-1920 (Basingstoke, 2010), and two guest-edited special issues of New Literary History (Economics, Culture and Value [2000]) and Victorian Literature and Culture (Victorian Boundaries [2004]). She is the Editor in Chief of Literature Compass and its Global Circulation Project and the President of the British Association for Victorian Studies. Updated October 18, 2010 |
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