Sincerity and Authenticity

“A powerful diagram of the moral life from Shakespeare to the present...a book crowded with insights.”—Geoffrey Hartman, New York Times

One of the twentieth century’s foremost literary critics traces the idea of the self across five hundred years of Western cultural history.

“One cannot both be sincere and seem so,” André Gide once wrote. Attempting to inhabit sincerity to satisfy social expectations makes it into a posture or a persona—a self-defeating enterprise. What, then, does the oft-re...