13 Facts About Jonathan Dollimore

Jonathan G Dollimore was born on 1948 and is a British philosopher and critic in the fields of Renaissance literature, gender studies, queer theory, history of ideas, death studies, decadence, and cultural theory.

Jonathan Dollimore is the author of four academic books, a memoir, and numerous academic articles.

At sixteen he suffered a serious road accident that necessitated a lengthy stay in hospital; it was during this period of convalescence that Jonathan Dollimore decided to become a writer.

Jonathan Dollimore spent four years as a reporter for a local newspaper before taking an A-level in English at Luton College of Technology, followed by a BA in English and Philosophy at Keele University.

Jonathan Dollimore achieved first class honours, but found the teaching, particularly of philosophy, uninspiring.

In 1974 Jonathan Dollimore began a PhD at Bedford College, University of London, but abandoned his projected thesis after little more than a year when he took up a lectureship at the University of Sussex.

Jonathan Dollimore later became Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York.

Jonathan Dollimore contributes three essays to the expanded second edition, including an introduction that explains and defends his approach.

Jonathan Dollimore explores the relationship between criticism, ethics and aesthetics, centring his discussion on literature's "dangerous knowledge".

Jonathan Dollimore calls for a shift in critical values from theoretical learning to experiential knowledge, endorsing a criticism capable of "being historically and imaginatively inside a perspective which one is critically resisting; struggling to escape its failures while seeing that one has already been changed by it".

The book contains a lengthy discussion of what Jonathan Dollimore calls "wishful theory," and the development of his idea of the daemonic: the inhumane values found at the heart of literature and civilization that traditional critics have ignored.

Jonathan Dollimore explains the continuing relevance of cultural materialism, and defends it against what he calls "dogged misunderstanding" of some of its theoretical positions.

In "Then and Now", Jonathan Dollimore reflects upon cultural materialism and the publication of Political Shakespeare, and goes on to examine the question of human nature through the lens of evolutionary biology.