Steven Gores studies practical modes of establishing subjectivity that were provided through visual arts and novels. He shows how these forms of emergent mass media created cultural spaces -- social space that functioned in the present, historical space, and erotic space that focused on the future -- that were used as vehicles for both cultural and individual self-representation.

Gores first analyzes Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker and Jane Austen's Persuasion in conjunction with visual evidence of social settings they contain, such as the London pleasure gardens of Ranelagh and Vauxhall. Through this analysis, he describes how assertions of identity and rank were becoming more complicated as social space was shaped by the architectural articulation of space and the codification of etiquette.

He next examines Sophia Lee's novel The Recess, along with prints and sketches of ruins, to place the monastic ruin at the focus of desire to repress discontinuity in the past, which in turn permitted individuals to conceive of constructing identity based on genealogy. Then, through a study of Henry Fielding's Amelia, he discusses portrait miniatures and silhouettes as fetishized symbols of erotic ties, showing how images of a beloved, with their promises for the future, were used as a basis for constructing individual identity.

By establishing aconnection between these new means of constructing identity and the rise of visual and print media, Gores shows how these psychosocial spaces were potentially liberating for individual subjects. He also suggests that the influence of the psychosocial on forming our impressions of the self has grown more complex with the expansion of mass communication media in our own times.