Double Vision: Literary Palimpsests of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literary Palimpsests - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0739125699 ISBN 13: 9780739125694

Publisher: RLPG/Galleys, 2008

Synopsis

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 going on 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 use of the palimpsest in their attempts to strike a balance between preserving old ways and privileging new innovations.

About this title

Review

Taken together, the chapters of this book . . . make a real contribution to the field.--Larry H. Peer, Brigham Young University

About the Author

Darby Lewes is professor of English at Lycoming College in Pennsylvania.

About this edition

• Publisher: RLPG/Galleys
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0739125699
• ISBN 13: 9780739125694
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 296
• Editor: Lewes Darby