This study analyzes late-seventeenth and eighteenth-century autobiographies in order to address questions regarding the relationship between the history of reading and the history of the self in the West. More particularly, it examines the treatment of reading and textuality in John Bunyan\u27s Grace Abounding and Jean-Jacques Rousseau\u27s Confessions in order to suggest that the historical phenomenon Michel Foucault describes as the emergence of Man can be understood in terms of the rise of mass print culture and subsequent development of extensive reading practices during the eighteenth century
