Novel Minds : Philosophers and Romance Readers, 1680-1740 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

Eighteenth-century philosophy owes much to the early novel. Using the figure of the romance reader this book tells a new story of eighteenth-century reading. The impressionable mind and mutable identity of the romance reader haunt eighteenth-century definitions of the self, and the seductions of fiction insist on making an appearance in philosophy.