Experimental Selves : Person and Experience in Early Modern Europe.

Cover -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. Changing the Subject: Early Modern Persons and the Culture of Experiment -- 1 The Shape of Knowledge: The Culture of Experiment and the Byways of Expression -- 2 The Art of the Inside Out: Vision and Expression in Hoogstraten's Peepshow -- 3 Persons and Portraits: The Vicissitudes of Burckhardt's Individual -- 4 Justice in the Marketplace: The Invisible Hand in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fayre -- 5 Actor, Act, and Action: The Poetics of Agency in Corneille, Racine, and Molière -- 6 The Experiment of Beauty: Vraisemblance Extraordinaire in Lafayette's Princesse de Clèves -- 7 Groping in the Dark: Aesthetics and Ontology in Diderot and Kant -- Conclusion. Person, Experiment, and the World They Made -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index.

Drawing on the generous semantic range the term enjoyed in early modern usage, the book argues that person as early moderns understood it was an "experimental" phenomenon--at once a given of experience and the self-conscious arena of that experience.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.