Description: When we speak of "character" or"reading" another's mind, we imagine the self as a text -- an idea that dates from the beginnings of Western culture. Eric Jager traces the self-as-text concept in literature and art from antiquity to the modern day, discussing writers from Plato, Augustine, and Dante to Shakespeare, Locke, and Freud. He focuses especially on the Middle Ages, when the metaphorical "book of the heart" modeled on the manuscript codex attained its most vivid expressions, but he also shows how the "book of the heart" was replaced by the early modern "book of the brain" with the birth of printing, Protestantism, and the New Science. Finally, in a bold conclusion, he considers what the much-prophesied "death of the book" might portend for twenty-first-century conceptions of the posttextual self.

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