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." Samuel Johnson and Pascal Paoli, the great protagonists of the three major narratives Boswell published during his lifetime, are heroic spirits who manage to survive in an age of spiritual disintegration only by dwelling within imperiled private worlds of coherence and belief. "The Boswellian Hero," the first...
Boswell's "Life of Johnson," "Tour of the Hebrides," and "Tour to Corsica" are controlled, argues William Dowling, by "a single conception of the hero...
"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." The sources of puzzlement are, he notes, many. For some, it is Ricoeur's famously indirect style of presentation, in which the polarities of argument and exegesis seem so often and so suddenly to have reversed themselves. For others, it is the extraordinary intellectual range of Ricoeur's argument, drawing on traditions as distant from each other as Heideggerian...
"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 re...
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. In Jameson, Althusser, Marx, first published in 1984, Professor Dowling sets out to provide the intellectual background needed for an understanding of Jameson's argument and its broader implications. He elucidates the unspoken assumptions that are the foundation of Jameson's thought - assumptions about how the nature of language, of interpretation and of...
Frederic Jameson is widely regarded as one of the most original and influential Marxist critics of the last decades. His most controversial work, The ...
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 editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in...
In this deconstructionist interpretation of a major eighteenth-century work, William Dowling analyzes Boswell's Life of Johnson as a paradigm of an...
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...
The eighteenth-century verse epistle, argues William Dowling, was an attempt to solve in literary terms the dilemma of solipsism as raised by Locke...
