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

by Robert W. Uphaus

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813187785
Publisher:	University Press of Kentucky
Publication date:	11/21/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	476 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Robert W. Uphaus is associate professor of English at Michigan State University.

Editorial Reviews

Well informed, compact, and perspicuous... the book could serve as a vade mecum for a course in eighteenth-century prose.

South Atlantic Quarterly

A convincing and always interesting view of how—and with what probable results—the writer of eighteenth-century prose went about forcing his reader to participate in his text.

Johnsonian Newsletter

"Well informed, compact, and perspicuous... the book could serve as a vade mecum for a course in eighteenth-century prose." — South Atlantic Quarterly

"A convincing and always interesting view of how — and with what probable results — the writer of eighteenth-century prose went about forcing his reader to participate in his text." — Johnsonian Newsletter

From the Publisher