The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle (Princeton Legacy Library): 1207 - Softcover

The eighteenth-century verse epistle, argues William Dowling, was an attempt to solve in literary terms the dilemma of solipsism as raised by Locke and Hume. The focus of The Epistolary Moment is on internal audience in poetry--the audience "inside" the poem, created by its discourse and belonging to its world--as this divides in epistolary poetry into a double or simultaneous register of address: the audience directly addressed by the letter-writer, and an epistolary audience listening in on the exchange from a point external to the discourse of the speaker but internal to the discourse of the poem. Epistolary audience lies, contends The Epistolary Moment, at the heart of an Augustan theory of poetry as ideological intervention, poems as symbolic acts with enormous consequences in the domain of the real. The emergence of the verse epistle as the dominant form in eighteenth-century poetry thus takes as its ultimate context the origins of eighteenth-century solipsism in a degraded modernity symbolized by Sir Robert Walpole and his Robinocracy, the demonic representatives of a new money or market society arising from the ruins of organic or traditional community. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

William C. Dowling is University Distinguished Professor of English and American Literature at Rutgers University, and the 2012 recipient of the Robert Maynard Hutchins Award for his contributions to the cause of integrity in intercollegiate athletics. Of the ten books he has published, the most recent include Oliver Wendell Holmes in Paris: Medicine, Theology, and the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson, and The Senses of the Text: Intensional Semantics and Literary Theory. He has also written widely on college sports in such publications as The Chronicle of Higher Education and Academic Questions, and about challenges to the system of scholarly communication in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing.