Psychosocial Spaces: Verbal/Visual Readings of British Culture, 1750-1820

Citizens of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Great Britain lived in a time when the determination of social identity by birth was eroding due to the rise of capitalism. Psychosocial Spaces explores how members of British society situated themselves in relation to culture and thereby defined the "self" in psychosocial space. Steven Gores studies practical modes of establishing 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. By establishing a connection between these new means of constructing identity and the rise of visual and print media, Gores shows how these psychosocial spaces were potentially liberating for individual subjects.