Sarah Dillon Livres

Planning for Escape is the haunting, darkly comical, story of a young woman's quest for personal and artistic fulfillment--a goal she is brilliant at sabotaging. Narrated through an intense, witty, yet poetically lyrical interior monologue, Catherine interweaves her own unique perspectives on memory, family, and place, with the compelling and luminous account of her endlessly disappointing search for love through a dazzling array of quirky people and unforgettable places. Grounded in an escape to memorable places--from New England to Ireland, to Japan and back again--the narrative ultimately shifts to the historically preserved and richly ambient world of Greensboro, Vermont. This novel will inspire every searcher who ever felt disappointed with what life had delivered, as opposed to what was expected. It is for all those who ever wanted to escape, ever longed to return home, or ever considered deriving new joy from simply giving up and saying goodbye to old places in search of the new.

Focusing on the importance of narratives, the book argues for their critical role in enhancing public reasoning. It presents a framework for collecting narrative evidence that works alongside scientific data, aiming to enrich understanding rather than undermine it. Dillon and Craig emphasize the necessity of integrating storytelling into evidence-based discussions to foster deeper insights and more effective communication.

Drawing together diverse literary, critical and theoretical texts in which the palimpsest has appeared since its inauguration by Thomas De Quincey in 1845, Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory provides the first ever genealogy of this metaphor. Sarah Dillon's original theorisation argues that the palimpsest has an involuted structure which illuminates and advances modern thought. While demonstrating how this structure refigures concepts such as history, subjectivity, temporality, metaphor, textuality and sexuality, Dillon returns repeatedly to the question of reading. This theorisation is interwoven with close readings of texts by D. H. Lawrence, Arthur Conan Doyle, Umberto Eco, Ian McEwan and H.D. Clearly written, and negotiating a range of critical theories and modern literary texts, it provides a reference point and critical tool for future employment of the concept of 'palimpsestuousness', and makes a significant contribution to the debate surrounding the relationship between theoretical and critical writing on literature.