This volume, 'Representations of the Self', explores a theme that has become central in our time, as 'the death of God' is widely seen to be succeeded by 'the death of Man'. Our contributors set forth its urgency in a variety of contexts. Peter Stern gives the paradigmatic history of the bereft, damaged, and repudiated self in German philosophy and literature from Kleist to Ernst Jilnger. In 'Not I' Michael Edwards pursues the theological and psychological consequences of a self without substance. Peter France supplies a witty account of the marriage of self and commerce more at home in the eighteenth-century tradition of British empiricism, and the challenge of Rousseau's refusal of the terms of commerce. Raman Selden explores views of the self from the Romantics to the poststructuralists. Roger Cardinal probes the secret diary: is the genre a contradiction in terms? Stephen Bann explores the representations of Narcissus in recent psychoanalytic theory. Pierre Dupuy analyses the self-referential logic of current literary and social theory. David James extends Wolfgang Iser's analysis of textual indeterminacies to construct new readings of Stendhal.
Julie Scott Meisami writes on the subtle conventions of Persian lyric in the presentation of persona; reviewing a major study by Rene Etienible, Gregory Blue traces the distorting European visions of the Chinese 'self'. Mark Ogden reviews recent books on Holderlin, the supreme lyricist of the self and its loss. A. D. Nuttall looks at the influential new-historicist readings of Shakespeare.