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Description
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.
Robert W. Uphaus is associate professor of English at Michigan State University.
"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
Publication Date
1979
Publisher
The University Press of Kentucky
Place of Publication
Lexington, KY
ISBN
9780813113890
eISBN
9780813159652
Keywords
English prose, English literature, Rationality, Symmetry
Disciplines
Literature in English, British Isles
Recommended Citation
Uphaus, Robert W., "The Impossible Observer: Reason and the Reader in Eighteenth-Century Prose" (1979). Literature in English, British Isles. 103.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/103
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