Nancy Armstrong argued that the domestic novel did not describe the modern individual — it manufactured one. Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) reads conduct books and courtship novels from Richardson to the Brontës as the machinery through which a new kind of person came into being: interior, self-regulating, defined by feeling rather than rank, and female. The claim reversed the usual order of explanation. Rather than treating fiction as a reflection of a rising middle class, Armstrong made the novel an agent of the change, arguing that a form organized around a woman's desires and her household established the private, psychological self that later became the political subject. The book combined Foucault's account of disciplinary power with feminist literary history, and it remains one of the most cited works of Anglo-American novel studies. She continued the argument in How Novels Think (2005), tracing the individual's construction and eventual dismantling across two centuries, and in Fiction in the Age of Photography. Armstrong has taught at Brown and Duke and edited the journal Novel.