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This course will explore literary answers to a question that was newly strange and difficult to answer for English writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: what does it mean to be “a person”? Is a person a psychologically coherent individual; the citizen of a nation; a political actor; an economic agent? Are all humans persons? What obligations does one person owe to another? Literary answers to these questions have continued to serve as common sense ideas of the individual. We will study different ways of posing and answering the question of “the individual” in poems, prose fiction, and drama, by writers such as Aphra Behn, Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Samson Occom, Olaudah Equiano, the anonymous author of A Woman of Color, William Wordsworth, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy. Supplemental readings drawn from contemporaneous and influential legal and political texts.