The story of the I: First persons and others in eighteenth-century narrative

This dissertation argues that the first person is important to eighteenth-century fiction and philosophy because it undermines, rather than secures, the individual. We typically think of the "I" as a term humans use to refer to themselves, and we understand it to designate a particular individual: however, these assumptions were not taken for granted by the fiction or the philosophy of the period. Questions such as whether the "I" might refer to more than one body, or whether it might be uttered by an animal, an object, or a machine, originate in philosophy and soon appear in fiction. This, the project argues, is evident in a wide variety of works, primarily novels (Defoe's Roxana, Cleland's Fanny Hill, Burney's Evelina, Shelley's Frankenstein) and adventure tales (it-narratives, which are stories told by objects), but also in periodicals (the Spectator papers) and poetry (Pope and Swift). These texts, far from presenting the first person as a conduit of individual, human experience, use non-individual or non-human narrators to ask what relation, if any, the "I" entails between mind and body, and what happens if one person's "I" does not effectively refer to herself. These questions have their roots in philosophy but take on social and political force in fiction when it becomes clear that a contested "I" can interfere with basic forms of expressing desire or intention, including consent. The disputed status of the first person is significant not only to eighteenth-century fiction, but also to our understanding of the period more generally.;In accounts of the period's literature, the first person has been treated as a given (obviously human, obviously reporting personal experience); similarly, discussions of the early novel's engagement with philosophy emphasize the first person as a vehicle for empiricism and individualism. This project, in contrast, demonstrates how both fiction and philosophy question the first person's link to a single human individual. Contrary to orthodox accounts of the novel's emergence, eighteenth-century fiction does not rise from a fundament of solid self-expression, but rather from a negotiation of just who or what can have a self, and how it can be expressed.