Essay: Story of The Making of the Modern Self

The Making of the Modern Self presents to the reader an extraordinarily well-educated and thought-provoking involvement to the long-lasting intellectual engagement with the chronological construction of race, class and gender. This book can be considered as an exercise in English history that sheds light on more than the English case, and a representation of cultural history at its most go-getting (Awards, p.7).

The author also presents information about the radical changes that took place. As related to the above statement written by the author, he has further written that, “Amazons were not necessarily perceived as threatening, and they were as likely to have a good reputation. Thus, throughout the short eighteenth century, the lot of human Amazons, like that of Amazonian bees, was overall quite a good one. Moreover, throughout most of the eighteenth century one can readily find representations of actual Amazon queens” (Wahrman, p.7). The author continues by saying that, “By the 1970s a change – which had already begun in the 1780s – became much easier to dress in a more explicit political garb. Farm from being an Amazon – Amazonian behavior, Godwin wrote a few years later, was absurd, indelicate and unbecoming. Consider the successive editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The first and the second editions of 1771 and 1778, included entries on Amazons that were neutral if not appreciative in tone. But in the third edition of 1778, these were replaced with an avowedly critical essay that presented the Amazons as terrible, barbaric and politically dangerous” (Wahrman, p. 9-8).