Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Harvard University Press.
This book attempts to define the modern identity in describing its genesis.
I focus on three major facets of this identity: first, modern inwardness, the sense of ourselves as beings with inner depths, and the connected notion that we are 'selves'; second, the affirmation of ordinary life which develops from the early modern period; third, the expressivist notion of nature as an inner moral source. The first I try to trace through Augustine to Descartes and Montaigne, and on to our own day; the second I take from the Reformation through the Enlightenment to its contemporary forms; and the third I describe from its origin in the late eighteenth century through the transformations of the nineteenth century, and on to its manifestations in twentieth-century literature. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)