Essayistic Personae and Personhood

Wood, James Robert (2024) Essayistic Personae and Personhood. In: The Cambridge History of the British Essay. Cambridge University Press, pp. 137-151. ISBN 9781316516508

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Abstract

This chapter examines how essayistic personae enabled writers and readers to understand personhood as a means of making a unity out of multiplicity. It draws on Thomas Hobbes’s theory of the person to track how essayistic personae both depicted corporate personhood and themselves served as corporate persons, allowing many writers, real or imagined, to write as one. It also uses Locke’s theory of personhood to show how essayistic personae present conscious persons as contingent unities imposed upon multitudinous thoughts and experiences. Essayistic personae not only extended personhood to non-human beings, such as corporations and animals, they also drew attention to the limited nature of personhood for many human beings, including married women and enslaved people.

Item Type:	Book Section
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Research Group
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	31 Aug 2021 23:39
Last Modified:	12 May 2025 14:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/81254
DOI:	10.1017/9781009030373.013

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