‘Irish Novels of Precarious Self-Fashioning’ defines ‘self-fashioning’ as a mode of self-consciousness, a battle between ‘innate’ nature and the demands of social constructs; as such, the narrativising processes of the novel are ideally suited to the process of reimagining or remaking the self. This is made precarious for Irish writers not only by the challenges to a secure identity posed by the colonial condition but also by prescriptive social definitions of gender and nationality that extend beyond Ireland. A series of Irish novels from the late nineteenth century take these questions as their focus, including Emily Lawless’ Grania (1892), Somerville and Ross’s The Real Charlotte (1894), and, perhaps most famously, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Less well known, but equally important in this regard, are Katherine Cecil Thurston’s novels, The Masquerader (1904) and Max (1910), the latter of which radically challenges heteronormativity.

The perambulatory boundary clause form entered the English imaginary as a tool of colonization, when the West Saxons began writing charters that claimed British land using the textual forms of the Celtic British people. This relationally oriented landscape description—“from Ida’s creek to the long ridge, and from the long ridge to the wolf pit”—became standard in early medieval English land charters. The landmarks are not in themselves unique, but together, when “walked” by the reader or literally perambulated, combine to produce a unique spatial and legal entity. They were also in flux; over time, landmarks like “Ida’s creek” would have shifted and changed, requiring local, lived experience to navigate the physical, social, and chronological features of the described landscape. As a result, a form designed to stabilize legal boundaries also became a textual and epistemological model for navigating unstable relational identity in the centuries of English literature that followed. Understanding the development of this form in the Old English boundary clauses allows us to see how and why it is operating in Old English literature.

At the end of his life, the titular hero of Beowulf asks his young kinsman Wiglaf to build a mounment, hoping that his presence in the landscape will defend and preserve the memory of the people he leaves behind. Put another way, Beowulf seeks to remain a conceptual landmark by becoming a literal landmark. But in his desire to be reiterated, Beowulf is not alone. Navigating Landmarks of Identity shows that, across early medieval English literature, relational reiteration stabilizes relational identity when a subject’s relationships are uncertain or under threat—whether that be in riddles, catalogue poems, elegies, or charter boundary clauses. Such textual reiteration takes place not only when a boundary is transgressed, or a person is exiled, but throughout Old English literature when an author is confronted with the problem of “who” or “what” something is.

Many riddle subjects in the Exeter Book resist the landmarks of an explicitly human experience. Riddles that treat intimately known creatures (keys, books, ploughs, even oxen) build those creatures out of intimate knowledge: how, when, and why the creature is touched and valued. But riddles that treat more unfamiliar creatures—wild animals, mythological animals, and weather phenomena—build their subjects out of what little can be known, or accessed, by human beings: experience predicated on distance rather than intimacy. And unknown or unknowable concepts like Creation itself, in both Aldhelm’s Creatura and its Old English translation in the Exeter Book, are described through failures of human experience: as beyond the limits of the senses. In encompassing the unknown, the riddles invoke the failure of the senses to move beyond the landmarks of human experience without abandoning them. While the Latinate traditions that underlie many Old English riddles do not always include the social, chronological, and physical landmarks that define the form of relational reiteration, their Old English adaptations move towards, rather than away from, this mode of navigating identity.

The exiles, landowners, bookworms, and kings of early medieval English texts all faced a common problem: how do you know yourself, or anything else, in a relational and therefore constantly changing world? They answered that problem with relational reiteration: sometimes literally walking the edges of property bounds, and sometimes figuratively inviting a reader to walk the edges of a riddle’s solution, or an exile’s lost home. The reiteration of relational landmarks is a temporary solution; each time a relationship is altered or challenged, the bounds of relational identity must be traced anew. And in fact this problem of mutable identity changes only when literary characters or hagiographical narratives achieve Christian salvation, positioning God in these texts as an eternal relationship that cannot be lost, changed, or forgotten. But in the age of their making, most Old English and Anglo-Latin texts and characters relied upon reiteration to stabilize (or sometimes reimagine) their unsaved, ephemeral, relationally-constructed worlds.

Four load-bearing concepts delineate the specificity of wantonness in eighteenth-century Britain: motion, causality, selfhood, and form. This Introduction defines the literary sensorimotor as an array of ancient and modern theories about how words conjure vivid kinetic and proprioceptive imagery for readers. The critic John Dennis argued that powerful motor imagery depended on a reader not being able to pin down the causes of their intense and immersive reading experience. Johnson’s Dictionary defines movement that does not spring from clear causes or intentions as “wanton” motion: neither beautiful nor terrifying but nevertheless vibrant and irregular. Historically, legal wantonness fell somewhere between negligence and recklessness on the spectrum of intentionality. In opposition to the notion that deportment “discovered” a person’s true self, Landreth’s theorization of vital impersonality embraces non-normative embodiment and resists narrative norms of literary interiority. How a character or plot moves might be more important than why.

Chapter 4 turns to the danse macabre and the pathologization of motor disorders in two novels preoccupied with non-normative embodiment: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Smollett’s Humphry Clinker. Eighteenth-century conduct manuals often defined proper “carriage,” “comportment,” “mien,” and “air” in opposition to unusual or awkward motion. Resisting the all-too-common assumption that eccentric bodies function primarily as comic relief, Landreth looks to essays by Hume and Erasmus Darwin together with modern theorizations of ableism and motion sickness to read Sterne’s and Smollett’s novels as experiments in crafting new forms of sensorimotor selfhood. Both novels dispute practices of self-observation championed by Lockean philosophy and the Richardsonian novel tradition and ultimately challenge the assumption that the expression of one’s interior selfhood is – or should be – the main aim of fiction.

This chapter considers modernity from the perspective of the self-fashioning subject, stressing both the centrality of Jews to European modernity and their precarity. It pairs two contexts of change: the central-European crucible of Jewish modernity from the 1880s to 1920s; and the influence of psychoanalysis and Freudian-related thought. Torn between assimilation and collective identification against discrimination and antisemitism, many exchanged rural Judaism for emancipated intellectuality and leftwing political action. By the 1920s, a transnationally scaled antagonism pitted cosmopolitanism and this mobile intellectual culture of the highly educated against exclusivist ideas of national belonging. Freud’s life and career exemplified those histories. As a “scientific” approach to the study of mind, consciousness, and emotions, Freudianism reached far beyond the professional therapeutics of psychoanalysis itself. It joined far wider thinking about personhood and the unconscious, including other psychologies, spiritualism, esoteric knowledge, and the occult. It appealed to anyone seeking enlightenment by means of a self-consciously crafted modern self.

Even as friendship carries overwhelmingly positive connotations, the categories of “fair-weather friend” or “frenemy” indicate that less-than-ideal friendship is commonplace. What remains poorly understood is how people make sense of the persistence of their imperfect friendships. Drawing on studies of difficult friendships and friends who cohabitate, this chapter offers an interpretive perspective on how and why friendships that people characterize as difficult persist. Using the concept of the “good enough friend,” we unsettle ubiquitous yet simplistic directives of modern therapeutic culture to “cut off” difficult relationships. We argue that the potential for ease and difficulty are equally inherent to what friendship is, and that by attending to “difficult” ones and how people evaluate their worth, we can better understand how people navigate concord and conflict in personal life. We advance the intervention that a critical friendship must resist hierarchies of intimacy inherited from Western philosophical traditions that rank easy, pleasurable friendships as inherently “better” than ambivalent ones, which may also have core places in people’s lives.

The final chapter of the book takes a different focus and works through a particular rhythm. The chapter seeks to explore the value at stake not in the possession itself, but rather in the relationship of possession the owner held with it. It wants to further understand why maintaining possession over time was so important and what it did in cultural and social terms. The chapter does so by focusing on a single novel, Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782). The novel is deeply concerned with questions of property and examines what happens when property and possessions are lost. As such, it offers an important lens through which to explore the value of keeping hold. The chapter particularly examines how maintaining possession of your things was important to the broader project so important within eighteenth-century culture: that of maintaining self-possession. We know that possessions were important to the construction and display of the self, and here we see how the loss of such possessions threatened that project.

The chapter explores the ways in which Clare’s sense of personal identity and selfhood is first created, and then fashioned and influenced, by the many differing pressures brought to bear upon it. Such pressures include poetic antecedents, social and economic conditions, literary associations and relationships, as well as the more personal features of an upbringing rooted in the natural world, which is authoritative and confirming, and an internal world, which is increasingly fragile and unstable. The chapter traces these evolutions – from the earliest verse that Clare wrote to the last poems of his asylum years.

Clare had the good fortune to be born into a period of excitement and experimentation in poetry. Ideas about poetry were changing, as were practices of reading and writing. This chapter examines how Clare participated in these changes. He helped to elevate the meditative lyric to the pinnacle of literary prestige by showing how everyday experiences yield pleasure and insight; by using forms with roots in oral and folk cultures, including popular song; and by modelling his poems on the music of nature and the structure of bird nests. He took part in contemporary experiments with form, language, and voice. His poems draw on the philosophical atmosphere of the Romantic age by offering readers opportunities carefully to observe Clare’s world and, by doing so, to come to know it.

This chapter begins by interrogating the ideal of authenticity as a paradigmatic modern response to the crisis of master narratives. It critically examines practices of narrative selfhood, and discusses the ways in which social roles offer scaffolds for the development of a self without fully constituting such a self. Role-playing – the inhabitation of social and narrative roles – is an outstanding example of the exercise of imagination, its double function of finding and making, and its for-the-most-part inherited, moulded, and largely habituated practice. The chapter concludes with a theological discussion of the ways our habitual imagination of selfhood can be broken open without pretence that we might be able to find a fully realized authentic self beneath our narrative and social roles.

This chapter introduces the main topic of this book, inducing intimacy, and explains that the focus is deceptively induced sex and intimate relationships (i.e., sex and sexual and/or romantic relationships). It then sets out the book’s core aims, that is, to examine how the law has responded to inducing intimacy as a form of wrongdoing and source of harms and what can this tell us about the justifiability and desirability of using law to respond to these practices in the present age. The chapter also outlines the scope of the book and the sources used before introducing the theoretical framework that informs the analysis in the remaining chapters, which is based on the cultural significance of sex and marriage, including their significance for self-construction. The chapter closes by outlining the main arguments of the book, including the potential for its historical analysis to inform contemporary debates about whether and how to respond to inducing intimacy via law today.