In this deconstructionist interpretation of a major eighteenth-century work, William Dowling analyzes Boswell's Life of Johnson as a paradigm of antithetical structure in narrative, and develops a grammar of discontinuity" for interpreting other texts as well.Originally published in 1981.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The eighteenth-century verse epistle, argues William Dowling, was an attempt to solve in literary terms the dilemma of solipsism as raised by Locke and Hume. The focus of The Epistolary Moment is on internal audience in poetry--the audience "inside" the poem, created by its discourse and belonging to its world--as this divides in epistolary poetry into a double or simultaneous register of address: the audience directly addressed by the letter-writer, and an epistolary audience listening in on the exchange from a point external to the discourse of the speaker but internal to the discourse of the poem. Epistolary audience lies, contends The Epistolary Moment, at the heart of an Augustan theory of poetry as ideological intervention, poems as symbolic acts with enormous consequences in the domain of the real. The emergence of the verse epistle as the dominant form in eighteenth-century poetry thus takes as its ultimate context the origins of eighteenth-century solipsism in a degraded modernity symbolized by Sir Robert Walpole and his Robinocracy, the demonic representatives of a new money or market society arising from the ruins of organic or traditional community.Originally published in 1991.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Description: “The object of this book,” writes William C. Dowling in his preface, “is to make the key concepts of Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative available to readers who might have felt bewildered by the twists and turns of its argument...read more

Product Description: Boswell's Life of Johnson, Tour of the Hebrides, and Tour to Corsica are controlled, argues William Dowling, by "a single conception of the heroic character, one that reaches beyond the particular narrative situation to a final vision of man's dilemma in the modern world...read more

Book by Black, Al, Manlove, Bill

Product Description: Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s Breakfast Table Trilogy was a series of extremely popular essays published in The Atlantic Monthly from its first issue in 1857 to 1870. Speaking to the cultural and religious concerns of the period, these essays made Holmes famous on both sides of the Atlantic...read more

Product Description: In recent years the notion of determinate meaning—the idea that a word or a line in a literary text means one thing rather than another thing, X rather than Y—has been widely rejected in the name of Derrida and différance, reader-response criticism, and "ideological" approaches proclaiming meaning to be no more than a site of political contestation...read more

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Product Description: "Poetry", once despaired W.H.Auden, "makes nothing happen". That, however, is a modern condition, argues William Dowling, for in the 18th century poets helped topple corrupt governments and fuel revolutions. In this work on the creation and early days of the American republic, Dowling revives the literary and intellectual atmosphere of the period by examining major works of four early American poets of the circle known as the Connecticut Wits and their British forerunners...read more

Product Description: Frederic Jameson is widely regarded as one of the most original and influential Marxist critics of the last decades. His most controversial work, The Political Unconscious, had an enormous impact on literary criticism and cultural studies...read more