A palimpsest is at once easy to define and, at the same time, so infinitely various as to defy all denotation. A thrifty technique employed by the ancients to recycle scarce resources? Or a metaphor for the human mind? A text that overwrites another text? Or a culture that overwrites another culture? This concise, readable volume examines texts written by such figures as William Blake, Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe, and Frederick Douglass, in order to explore the dualistic thinking involved in the creation of literary palimpsests during the tempestuous eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Contributors to this collection analyze the alienation and disorientation caused by the tremendous social and political revolution going on throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States and Great Britain. Writers and philosophers of the time were charged with the task of reorienting themselves and their readers within the ever-changing social and political constructs that characterized their lives. Double Vision shows how these writers employed the use of the palimpsest in their attempts to strike a balance between preserving old ways and privileging new innovations.

Percy Bysshe Shelley's utopian vision was largely a product of the tumultuous final quarter of the eighteenth century, when the American, French, and industrial revolutions profoundly changed the way in which social, political, and economic relationships were viewed. In A Brighter Morn, noted Shelley scholars identify the qualities of this unique brand of utopianism, which was a complex and frequently conflicted blend of the personal, poetical, and political realms. This collection of essays sorts through these perplexities and discords, exploring Shelleyan utopianism in a variety of contexts- place and placelessness, time and timelessness, publicity and privacy, and physicality and spirituality- and concluding with a snapshot of the Western psyche at a crucial point in its development.