Reviews: Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790-1861

Exclusive Online Reviews In Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790-1861, Siân Silyn Roberts explores how Enlightenment concepts of the self-contained individual, as proposed by John Locke, are tested in a post-Revolutionary American environment. Turning to Bird's Sheppard Lee, she argues that the tale of body-hopping offers an "alternative model of the mind" (104) that disconnects identity from geographical location and economic and social position, presenting a performative subject continually in a state of "becoming" (111). Gothic Subjects deftly unites the cultural form of the Gothic with transatlantic sociopolitical debates on the individual and society in the antebellum period.