Romanticism and the Contingent Self

Michael Falk is Senior Lecturer in Digital Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is a literary scholar and programmer, whose work considers how computing can expand the study of literature, and how literature can expand the study of computing. His work appears in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Frontiers in AI and Robotics, the John Clare Society Journal, and elsewhere. Romanticism and the Contingent Self is his first book.

• 1 Introduction: Strange Multiplicities.- 2 Philosophy: Eighteenth-Century Theories of Contingent Selfhood.- 3 Fiction: Growing Down in the Novels of Maria Edgeworth and Amelia Opie.- 4 Poetry: Absence of Self in the Sonnets of Charlotte Smith and John Clare.- 5 Drama: Inward Seas in the Tragedies of Joanna Baillie and Charles Harpur.- 6 Life: The ‘Multiform’ Self in Tom Moore’s Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830-31).- 7 Conclusion: Rising to the Challenge of Representation.