Sister Carrie

Right, so I'll move on to my first quote of the day.

And this one is from an early 20th century novel called Sister Carrie.

It's by a guy called Theodore Dreiser.

And here's a quote.

But they certainly do end up very wealthy, uh, and, uh, materially better off than they had, uh, begun.

Um, I'm thinking specifically of, uh, Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, um, whose protagonist, uh, just-- I mean, she moves from, uh, the Midwest countryside, uh, to New York and is there introduced to all of these new things to want, new ways of wanting to be.

Um, and it's shifting just constantly.

I mean, Carrie just wants stuff.

So "Realism After the Individual" is your title.

Um, and you argue in the book that the model of the individual as this kind of autonomous and discrete person in the nineteenth century realist novel gets really renovated into something quite different in the, um, the corpus that you're looking at, and particularly into this post-individualist model of a, or a kind of model of social selfhood or whatever.

And so I guess that fits with what you've just described there about what's happening in, with Carrie in Sister Carrie.

But would you tell us a little bit, maybe just give us a potted history of these kind of shifting concepts of the individual for those who might not know anything about them?