Bringing together new and established scholars, Individualism is a fascinatingly revisionist set of essays, some remarkable, on the cultural fates of personhood - "subjective" identity - in, mostly, the modern West since the seventeenth century: though the collection starts with study of a newfound medieval romance that forces rethinking of the age's experience of personhood and a near-Mandevillean account of Shakespeare, and closes with analyses of Reading Lolita in Tehran and of the exclusion of "exotic" experience, including of the human, from post-Renaissance accounts of western history (opening to new inclusions of such experience, altering, now, contemporary practice). Between are strong essays on canonical writers from Locke and Defoe to Lukács, Bakhtin, Kafka, Faulkner and Adorno, and less- or non-canonical artists like Margaret Cavendish, spies haunting London's streets, Grub Street and Precisionist painting. Striking is most essayists' shared precept that literature is the best site for pondering these historical experiences of personhood, and that what literature and accompanying practices (like philosophy and painting) show over past centuries is lack of any uncomplicated experience and understanding of the "individual" and of the "individualism" taken adequately to describe or explain it: rather that however modern western experiences of personhood are caught up in active expansionist senses of "self," they simultaneously create various collectivities on which they depend and without whose forms of order and disorder all experience and idea of the person is without ground.