Shernaz Mollinger

Our contemporary levels of self-concern make it difficult to believe that the self has not always taken up quite so much room as it now does. The Modernist challenge to the “bourgeois myth” of society resulted in a self extended to fill the void left by the collapsed validity of everything else, and this extended self is reflected again and again in the self-referential literature of this century. Much has been written recently about the “new narcissism” and also about the self-involvement (text-involvement) of many 20th century literary texts. However, in America at least the phenomenon is not all that new. The abstracting, idealizing, cavalier morality, obsession with immediacy and superficial affects that are typical narcissistic defenses may be found in the culture of our time, as Christopher Lasch (1979) has argued, but they are also quite evident in the literature and thought of early 19th century New England. The reasons for this have to do

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