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.

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

Literature & Fiction

Uphaus, Robert W.

British & Irish

University Press of Kentucky

Beyond Tragedy: Structure and Experience in Shakespeare's Romances

History & Criticism

Univ Pr of Kentucky

In this compact, yet comprehensive exploration of Shakespeare's romances, Robert W. Uphaus suggests that the romances bring us to a realm of human and dramatic experience that is "beyond tragedy." The inexorable movement of tragedy toward death and a final close is absorbed in romance by a further movement in which death can lead to renewed life, characters can experience a second time of joy and peace, and the audience's conventional expectations about reality and literature are challenged and enlarged. In the late tragedies of King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, Uphaus finds the tragic structure augmented by elements that will later contribute to the form of the romances. Turning then to the romances themselves, he sees these plays as forming a profession in which Pericles is a brilliant outline of the conventions of romance and Cymbeline is romance taken to its dramatic limits, in fact to the point of parody. Through his fresh and provocative readings of the plays we experience anew the delight of Shakespearean romance and glimpse the world of renewal at its heart.

The Idea of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century examines the eighteenth-century novel within the context of a broad range of theoretical and historical perspectives.

Idea of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century (STUDIES IN LITERATURE, 1500-1800)

Colleagues Pr

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Books by Uphaus, Robert W.