This highly original study is concerned with the theory of knowledge. It
approaches the subject in a new way by exploring the recurrent paradox
which equates pure ignorance with perfect knowledge, twin ideals free
from the impurities and imperfections of discourse. The author combines
the techniques of literary criticism and intellectual history in order
to examine the literary, philosophical, theological, and political
ramifications of this anxiety about, and ambition to transcend, the
limits of the text. Dr Martin begins by tracing a network of
interlocking motifs and images - beginning and end, nescience and
omniscience, genesis and renascence, savagery and civilization - across
a broad spectrum of texts from the Book of Genesis through the
Renaissance (in particular the works of Nicholas of Cusa and Erasmus) to
Rousseau. The central section of the book translates these temporal
oppositions into the spatial antithesis of East and West in the
Orientalism of Hugo, Napoleon and Chateaubriand. A final chapter draws
together these apparently disparate themes in a consideration of the
dichotomy of science and literature in Jules Verne's Voyages
Extraordinaires.