Description
Book SynopsisDon Quixote is the first great modern paranoid adventurer.... Grandiosity and persecution define the characters of Swift''s Gulliver, Stendhal''s Julien Sorel, Melville''s Ahab, Dostoyevsky''s Underground Man, Ibsen''s Masterbuilder Solness, Strindberg''s Captain (in The Father), Kafka''s K., and Joyce''s autobiographical hero Stephen Dedalus.... The all-encompassing conspiracy, very much in its original Rousseauvian cast, has become almost the normal way of representing society and its institutions since World War Two, giving impetus to heroic plots and counter-plots in a hundred films and in the novels of Burroughs, Heller, Ellison, Pynchon, Kesey, Mailer, DeLillo, and others.from Paranoia and Modernity
Paranoia, suspicion, and control have preoccupied key Western intellectuals since the sixteenth century. Paranoia is a dominant concern in modern literature, and its peculiar constellation of symptomsgrandiosity, suspicion, unfounded hostility, delusions of pers
Trade Review
This ambitious book traces the workings of paranoia through a dizzying variety of texts, not only 'Cervantes to Rousseau,' but Sophocles to Pynchon, including detailed readings of the Gawain Poet, Luther, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Pascal, Leibniz, Locke, Pope, Swift, and Hemingway.
* Renaissance Quarterly *
