Paranoia and Modernity

"Don 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...

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.

John Farrell is Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College. He is also the author of Freud's Paranoid Quest: Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion .