Psychosocial spaces - Steven J Gores

Citizens of late 18th- and early-19th century Great Britain lived in a time when the determination of social identity by birth was eroding due to the rise of capitalism. This volume explores how members of British society situated themselves in relation to culture and thereby defined the "self" in psychosocial space. The author studies practical modes of establ ishing subjectivity that were provided through visual arts and novels. He shows how these forms of emergent mass media created cultural spaces - social space that functioned in the present, historical space, and erotic space that focused on the future - that were used as vehicles for both cultural and individual self-representation.;He analyzes Tobias Smollett's "Humphrey Clinker" and Jane Austen's "Persuasion" in conjunction with visual evidence of social settings they contain, such as the London pleasure gardens of Ranelagh and Vauxhall. Through this analysis, he describes how assertions of identity and rank were becoming more complicated as social space was shaped by the architectural articulation of space and the codification of etiquette.;He next examines Sophia Lee's novel "The Recess", along with prints and sketches of ruins, to place the monastic ruin at the focus of desire to repress discontinuity in the past, which in turn permitted individuals to conceive of constructing identity based on genealogy. Then, through a study of Henry Fielding's "Amelia", he discusses portrait miniatures and silhouettes as fetishized symbols of erotic ties, showing how images of a beloved, with their promises for the future, were used as a basis for constructing individual identity.;By establishing a connection between these new means of constructing identity and the rise of visual and print media, the author intends to show how these psychosocial spaces were potentially liberating for individual subjects. He also suggests that the influence of the psychosocial on forming our impressions of the self has grown more complex with the expansion of mass communication media in our own times.