This paper will examine selected texts by the late seventeenth-century writer John Dunton, who relates to the transformational element of subjectivity in a number of instances. Firstly, he worked as a publisher of books and periodicals that took the pulse of the contemporary London scene and provided a means for him to exploit the latest information and trends as opportunities for writing, remuneration, and non-too subtle forms of self-publication. Secondly, he is perhaps best known today for his Voyage round the World (1691), a whimsical examination of his youthful adventures in an experimental and oddly hybrid literary form that reads as part autobiography part proto-novel, in which he expresses his personal and literary prodigality by means of the transformational test case of his apprenticeship and his periodic resistances to it. Finally, he published The Life and Errors, an exercise in life-writing that presents a contrasting picture of a mature, reflective, penitent Dunton lamenting the kind of prodigality expressed in the Voyage and offering a set of revised rules for a life to be imaginatively lived over again. Dunton’s writings show up different, sometimes competing, versions of the self, and serve as a reminder that expressions of identity are context-led. This paper, then, gives a sense of the inconsistent, opportunistic, frequently contentious and flamboyant aspects of Dunton’s self-presentation at the cross-roads of various personal and professional, as well as cultural and literary, changes.

—Dr Melanie Ord, UWE