Double vision : literary palimpsests of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries / edited by Darby Lewes.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Lewes, Darby, 1946-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

English literature--18th century--History and criticism.

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Intertextuality.

Authors, English--19th century--Aesthetics.

Authors, English.

Authors, English--18th century--Aesthetics.

Authors, American--19th century--Aesthetics.

Authors, American.

Authors, English--19th century--Political and social views.

Political and social views.

Authors, English--18th century--Political and social views.

Authors, American--19th century--Political and social views.

Aesthetics.

Physical Description:

xxii, 273 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Lanham, MD : Lexington Books, [2008]

Summary:

A palimpsest is at once easy to define and, at the same time, so infinitely various as to defy all denotation. A thrifty technique employed by the ancients to recycle scarce resources? Or a metaphor for the human mind? A text that overwrites another text? Or a culture that overwrites another culture? This concise, readable volume examines texts written by such figures as William Blake, Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe, and Frederick Douglass, in order to explore the dualistic thinking involved in the creation of literary palimpsests during the tempestuous eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Contributors to this collection analyze the alienation and disorientation caused by the tremendous social and political revolution throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States and Great Britain. Writers and philosophers of the time were charged with the task of reorienting themselves and their readers within the ever-changing social and political constructs that characterized their lives. Double Vision shows how these writers employed the palimpsest in their attempts to strike a balance between preserving old ways and privileging new innovations.

Contents:

Richardson Agonistes : the trial of the author in the contest for authority / William Wandless

Marginal(ized) Blake : the annotations to Reynolds' Discourses / Darby Lewes

William Blake and the Bible : reading and writing the law / Michael Farrell

The dark assassin : Thomas James Mathias' notes for The pursuits of literature / Alex Watson

De Quincey and the palimpsest / Christopher Whalen

"Things as they are" : Godwin's Caleb Williams and the politics of the preface / Jeff Miles

Opening up chapter 13 of Coleridge's Biographia literaria : humor, reception, and English character / Brian Bates

Tennyson's The princess as palimpsest : the Oriental tale and woman's nature / Christy Rieger

"What remains?" : intertextual itinerary and palimpsestic melancholia in Christina Rossetti's "Monna innominata" / Erin Menut

Memory as a palimpsest in Wilkie Collins's The haunted hotel / Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

On the fin de siècle margin : justifying the texts of T.K. Nupton, Max Beerbohm and Enoch Soames / Paul Fox

Parodies for the rail : Dombey and Son, Vanity Fair, and the class-coding of Victorian realism / Michael J. Flynn

The middle passages of Arthur Mervyn / Liam Corley

Reading Poe reading Blackwood's : the palimpsestic subtext in "The fall of the house of Usher" / Diane Long Hoeveler

The spaces left : resistance and erasure in Frederick Douglass's palimpsestic narratives / Zoe Trodd.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-260) and index.

ISBN:

9780739125694

0739125699

OCLC:

232327187