Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Boswellian Hero

The Boswellian Hero

Dowling, William C.

Paperback

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0820333107
ISBN13: 9780820333106
Publisher: Univ Of Georgia Pr
Published: Jul 1 2008
Pages: 224
Weight: 0.74
Height: 0.51 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
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 comprehensive thematic study of Boswellian narrative, is also a work with strong theoretical implications for students of biography as a genre. Biography exists as literature, according to Dowling, only in relation to formal or objective interpretations of its meaning--to read the Life of Johnson as a literary work is to dissociate its biographical hero from any real or historical Samuel Johnson in the same way one dissociates Shakespeare's Richard III from Richard III of England. Although The Boswellian Hero promises to establish its importance in Boswell studies immediately, it will also be of significant interest to readers concerned with the hero in literature, with biography as a narrative form, and with the complex theoretical problem of factual or historical literature.

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