Studying major writers and philosophers - Schegel and Schleiermacher in Germany, Wordsworth in England and Chateaubriand in France - Gerald Izenberg shows how a combination of political, social and psychological developments resulted in the modern concept of selfhood. More than a study of one national culture influencing another, this work goes to the heart of kindred intellectual processes in three European countries. Izenberg makes two related arguments. The first is that the Romantics developed a new idea of the self as characterized by fundamentally opposing impulses - a drive to assert the authority of the self and expand that authority to absorb the universe, and the contradictory impulse to surrender to a greater idealized entity as the condition of the self's infinity. The second argument seeks to explain these paradoxes historically, showing how romantic individuality emerged as a compromise.