Description

Book Synopsis
This study argues that ignorance is a part of the narrative and poetic force of literature and is an important aspect of its thematic focus: ignorance is what literary texts are about. It sees that the dominant conception of literature since the Romantic period involves an often unacknowledged engagement with the experience of not knowing.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Ignorance and philosophy
2. Literary ignorance
3. To see as poets do: Romanticism, the sublime, and poetic ignorance
4. The opposite of epistemology: Keatsian nescience
5. Our ignorance of others: Middlemarch and Great Expectations
6. Joseph Conrad’s blindness
7. Children, death, and the enigmatic signifier: Wordsworth and Bowen
8. Monsters and trees: Epistemelancholia in David Hume and Henry James
9. American ignorance: Philip Roth’s America trilogy
10. The politics of authorial ignorance: Contemporary poetry

Ignorance Literature and Agnoiology

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    A Paperback by Andrew Bennett

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      Publisher: Manchester University Press
      Publication Date: 6/30/2015 12:00:00 AM
      ISBN13: 9780719097430, 978-0719097430
      ISBN10: 0719097436

      Description

      Book Synopsis
      This study argues that ignorance is a part of the narrative and poetic force of literature and is an important aspect of its thematic focus: ignorance is what literary texts are about. It sees that the dominant conception of literature since the Romantic period involves an often unacknowledged engagement with the experience of not knowing.

      Table of Contents

      Acknowledgements
      Introduction
      1. Ignorance and philosophy
      2. Literary ignorance
      3. To see as poets do: Romanticism, the sublime, and poetic ignorance
      4. The opposite of epistemology: Keatsian nescience
      5. Our ignorance of others: Middlemarch and Great Expectations
      6. Joseph Conrad’s blindness
      7. Children, death, and the enigmatic signifier: Wordsworth and Bowen
      8. Monsters and trees: Epistemelancholia in David Hume and Henry James
      9. American ignorance: Philip Roth’s America trilogy
      10. The politics of authorial ignorance: Contemporary poetry

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