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. Contributors to this collection analyze the alienation and disorientation caused by the tremendous social and political revolution going on throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States and Great Britain. Writers and philosophers of the time were charged with the task of reorienting themselves and their readers within the ever-changing social and political constructs that characterized their lives. Double Vision shows how these writers employed the use of the palimpsest in their attempts to strike a balance between preserving old ways and privileging new innovations.
1 Contents 2 Acknowledgments Chapter 3 Introduction: Homotextuality: Revealed and Revealing Texts Part 4 I. The Eighteenth Century: From Reason to Romanticism Chapter 5 1. Richardson Agonistes: The Trial of the Author in the Contest for Authority Chapter 6 2. Marginal(ized) Blake: The Annotations to Reynolds's Discourses Chapter 7 3. William Blake and the Bible: Reading and Writing the Law Chapter 8 4. The Dark Assassin: Thomas James Mathias's Notes for The Pursuits of Literature Part 9 II. The Romantic Period: Overwriting Neoclassicism Chapter 10 5. De Quincey and the Palimpsest Chapter 11 6. "Things as They Are": Godwin's Caleb Williams and the Politics of the Preface Chapter 12 7. Opening up Chapter 13 of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria: Humor, Reception, and English Character Part 13 III. The Victorian Period: Decorum and Decadence Chapter 14 8. Tennyson's The Princess as Palimpsest: The Oriental Tale and Woman's Nature Chapter 15 9. "What Remains?": Intertextual Itinerary and Palimpsestic Melancholia in Christina Rossetti's "Monna Innomminata" Chapter 16 10. Memory as a Palimpsest in Wilkie Collins's The Haunted Hotel Chapter 17 11. On the Fin de Siècle Margin: Justifying the Texts of T. K. Nupton, Max Beerbohm, and Enoch Soames Chapter 18 12. Parodies for the Rail: Dombey and Son, Vanity Fair, and the Class-Coding of Victorian Realism Part 19 IV. Nineteenth-Century Voices from America Chapter 20 13. The Middle Passages of Arthur Mervyn Chapter 21 14. Reading Poe Reading Blackwood's: The Palimpsestic Subtext in "The Fall of the House of Usher" Chapter 22 15. The Spaces Left: Resistance and Erasure in Frederick Douglass's Palimpsestic Narratives Chapter 23 Works Cited Chapter 24 Index 25 About the Contributors
Overview
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 ...