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 Impossible Observer: Reason and the Reader in 18th-Century Prose

The Impossible Observer: Reason and the Reader in 18th-Century Prose

Uphaus, Robert W.

Hardcover

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 081311389X
ISBN13: 9780813113890
Publisher: Univ Pr Of Kentucky
Published: Dec 31 1979
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.85
Height: 0.70 Width: 5.60 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

Rationality, objectivity, symmetry: were these really principles urged and exemplified by eighteenth-century English prose? In this persuasive study, Robert W. Uphaus argues that, on the contrary, many of the most important works of the period do not actually lead the reader into a new awareness of just how problematical, how unsusceptible to reason, both the world and our easy assumptions about it are.

Uphaus discusses a broad range of writers--Swift, Defoe, Mandeyville, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Johnson, and Godwin--showing that beneath their variety lies a fundamentally similar challenge, addressed to the critical procedure which assumes that the exercise of reason is a sufficient tool for an understanding the appeal of imaginative literature.

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