Duquesne University Press

Aspects of Subjectivity

Society and Individuality from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare and Milton

By Anthony Low

Published in 2003
$60.00  cloth
Short discount available
ISBN: 978-0-8207-0337-4  (0-8207-0337-0)

242 pages

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Book Information

This book focuses on representative literary works that illustrate turns in the history of individuality and subjectivity and the changes in one’s relations with community and society. In conjunction with The Wanderer, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Everyman, The Faerie Queene, Hamlet, and Paradise Lost, Low considers pertinent historical beliefs, attitudes, and practices, including the experience of loneliness and exile, the development of sacramental confession from communal reconciliation to personal absolution from sin, the abolition of Purgatory and the traditional Christian solidarity with the ancestral dead, the role of conscience in the development of self, and the rise in Shakespeare and Milton of a typically modern sense of autonomous individuality and subjectivity.

Author Information

ANTHONY LOW, a professor at New York University, is the author of numerous articles and books, including The Blaze of Noon: A Reading of Samson Agonistes, Love’s Architecture: Devotional Modes in the Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, The Georgic Revolution, and The Reinvention of Love: Poetry, Politics and Culture from Sidney to Milton.

Book Reviews

“Throughout, Low brilliantly questions the modernist critical consensus and adds valuable context and interpretive depth to understanding of literature and self.” — Choice

“The great promise of Low’s work lies in its capacity to combine literary interpretation with historical reflection in such a way that both procedures are mutually enhanced.” — Christianity and Literature

“This is a valuable book, not only because it is learned and well written, but especially because, without phony diction or posturing, Aspects of Subjectivity tells us something we don’t know. . . . This book guides us through the relevant readings that will help us understand a culture less fragmented, less egocentric, than our own.” — Ben Jonson Journal