Table of Contents

Private lives and public stories; personal ordering and providential order; negotiating reality; individualism and authority; the seduction of the self; from private narration to public narrative; textualizing the self; the necessary other - the dialogical structure of the self; self-ish narration and the authorial self; the emergence of literary authority; exemplification and the authoring of utopia; ironizing history; the great scroll of history; self emplotment and the implication of the reader.

About the Author

William Ray teaches at Reed College, Oregon. His previous publications include Literary Meaning: From Phenomenology to Deconstruction, also available from Blackwell, and numerous articles on literary theory. He is currently working on eighteenth-century poetics and theories of history.