Double Vision Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literary Palimpsests

by Lewes, Darby; Bates, Brian; Corley, Liam; Farrell, Michael P.; Flynn, Michael J.; Fox, Paul; Hoeveler, Diane Long; Menut, Erin; Miles, Jeff; Rieger, Christy; Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence; Trodd, Zoe; Wandless, William; Watson, Alex; Whalen, Christopher

• ISBN13: 9780739125694
• ISBN10: 0739125699
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-09-26
• Publisher: Lexington Books

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. ix
Introduction: Homotextuality: Revealed and Revealing Texts	p. xi
The Eighteenth Century: From Reason to Romanticism
Richardson Agonistes: The Trial of the Author in the Context for Authority	p. 3
Marginal(ized) Blake: The Annotations to Reynolds' Discourses	p. 15
William Blake and the Bible: Reading and Writing the Law	p. 27
The Dark Assassin: Thomas James Mathias' Notes for The Pursuits Of Literature	p. 37
The Romantic Period: Overwriting Neoclassicism
De Quincey and the Palimpsest	p. 55
"Things as they Are": Godwin's Caleb Williams and the Politics of the Preface	p. 69
Opening up Chapter 13 of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria: Humor, Reception, and English Character	p. 83
The Victorian Period: Decorum and Decadence
Tennyson's The Princess as Palimpsest: The Oriental Tale and Woman's Nature	p. 105
"What Remains?": Intertextual Itinerary and Palimpsestic Melancholia in Christina Rossetti's "Monna Innomminata"	p. 117
Memory as a Palimpsest in Wilkie Collins's The Haunted Hotel	p. 149
On the Fin de Siecle Margin: Justifying the Texts of T. K. Nupton, Max Beerbohm and Enoch Soames	p. 163
Parodies for the Rail: Dombey and Son, Vanity Fair, and the Class-Coding of Victorian Realism	p. 173
Nineteenth-century Voices from America
The Middle Passages of Arthur Mervyn	p. 207
Reading Poe Reading Blackwood's: The Palimpsestic Subtext in "The Fall of the House of Usher"	p. 227
The Spaces Left: Resistance and Erasure in Frederick Douglass's Palimpsestic Narratives	p. 239
Works Cited	p. 249
Index	p. 261
About the Contributors	p. 271
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