In the fall of 2019 I taught my eighteenth-century novel course as an exercise in slow reading, taking a tactic I had used before: putting a canonical work of fiction into the context of the other voices in the literary marketplace, and the circumstances of its making. For such a course, Tristram Shandy is an ideal central text. It was published…[Read more]

In the fall of 2019 I taught my eighteenth-century novel course as an exercise in slow reading, taking a tactic I had used before: putting a canonical work of fiction into the context of the other voices in the literary marketplace, and the circumstances of its making. For such a course, Tristram Shandy is an ideal central text. It was published…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: La cibernética, la neurología, la semiótica y la narratología han de emprender conjuntamente el estudio interdisciplinar de la consciencia entendida como la circulación retroalimentativa compleja entre distintos sistemas y circuitos cerebrales—así como entre distintas modalidades de representación en el cerebro. Se entender…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: Comentamos aquí sobre la integración de algunos aspectos éticos, estéticos, psicológicos y narrativos en la novela epistolar ´Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady´ de Samuel Richardson (1747-48), en concreto la encarnación de un ideal ético-estético en el personaje de Clarissa, y la elección consciente de una técnica na…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: El concepto de ‘autor implícito’ (implied author) lo difundió Wayne Booth en ‘La Retórica de la Ficción’ (1961) pero, como veremos, algo apuntaron al respecto con anterioridad otros autores. Aquí señalamos más en concreto el precedente de Hegel. ______…[Read more]

A note on the existential significance of Miguel de Unamuno’s metafiction. His novels question the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ which is the bedrock of workaday human reality. (A retropost from 2011).

This article attributes one of the three “first” editions of Leviathan to the London printer John Richardson (fl. 1673–1703), revising Noel Malcolm’s attribution to a different printer in the recent Clarendon Edition of Leviathan. We lay out the mystery of Leviathan’s so-called “Ornaments” edition and use evidence from damaged type pieces to say…[Read more]