Theresa Schön

The Enlightenment is generally known as the period in which the concept of the modern self took root. This development was accompanied by a search for new forms of literary representation that would enable the writer to depict human character adequately. One such form was the Theophrastan character-sketch that gained new popularity in seventeenth-century England and went through several phases of transformation, not least due to the publication of Jean de la Bruyère's 'Caractères'. Contemporary authors used the character-sketch to condense behaviour, outward appearance, or situations they had observed into short texts reflecting a (generic) character type. The attraction of the character-sketch to eighteenth-century writers lay, thus, in its ability to decode the complex human psyche. As a means of transforming complex individual people into fictional, but still recognizable character types, the character-sketch served as a link between literature and society.

In early eighteenth-century England, authors like Joseph Addison and Richard Steele incorporated the character-sketch into their periodicals, notably 'The Tatler' and 'The Spectator', trying to entertain and to educate the reader. They created fictional 'personae', i.e. character types that represented individual social spheres, but seemed more individualised by the addition of names and, in some cases, even a biography of their own. These 'personae' not only took the reader to different places familiar to the contemporary audience, discussing political, artistic, literary and social events. They also mediated knowledge about the human character by presenting character types to the reader in the form of fictional letters and diaries, or by showing them in interaction. Through their constant presence in the respective 'periodicals' and their formal construction, the 'personae' became entities that were able to authenticate new philosophical ideas about the character of man and to transform these into intelligible information that could be useful for the reader.

My dissertation contributes to the scholarly debate about the development of the modern self, and how eighteenth-century literature reflects this, using recent developments in cognitive narratology (such as the theory of mind) and exploring their potential for this analysis. The text corpus includes a) the moral weeklies, which form the core of the project, b) Jean de la Bruyère's 'Caractères', a publication which was responsible for innovations in form and content of the character-sketch, as well as the reception of French philosophical ideas in England, and c) a selection of eighteenth-century novels, which made use of the character-sketch when developing their own techniques of character depiction. The project is thus situated at the interface of literary studies, philosophy, anthropology and (literary) sociology, focussing on the mechanisms that enabled the authentication of philosophical concepts of character, and taking into account the creative process that established narrative representations on the basis of these theoretical concepts.