Nancy Armstrong argues that the history of the novel and the history of
the modern individual are, quite literally, one and the same. She
suggests that certain works of fiction created a subject, one displaying
wit, will, or energy capable of shifting the social order to grant the
exceptional person a place commensurate with his or her individual
worth. Once the novel had created this figure, readers understood
themselves in terms of a narrative that produced a self-governing
subject.
In the decades following the revolutions in British North America and
France, the major novelists distinguished themselves as authors by
questioning the fantasy of a self-made individual. To show how novels by
Defoe, Austen, Scott, Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Haggard, and Stoker
participated in the process of making, updating, and perpetuating the
figure of the individual, Armstrong puts them in dialogue with the
writings of Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Malthus, Darwin, Kant, and Freud.
Such theorists as Althusser, Balibar, Foucault, and Deleuze help her
make the point that the individual was not one but several different
figures. The delineation and potential of the modern subject depended as
much upon what it had to incorporate as what alternatives it had to keep
at bay to address the conflicts raging in and around the British novel.
