Dialogue, Didacticism and the Genres of Dispute:

Literary Dialogues in the Age of Revolution

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Adrian J Wallbank

The Enlightenment World

Dialogue was a pivotal genre for the spread of Enlightenment ideas. Focusing on non-canonical British writers Wallbank examines the evolution of dialogue as a genre during the Romantic period. He argues that dialogue often adopted a didactic stance explicitly geared towards making an argument sound persuasive, and demonstrates its influence in the development of such innovations as the realist novel, philosophical perspectivism and the advent of psychoanalysis.

Sample pages

• Introduction
• Index

Readership

Literature, Romanticism, History of the Book, Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Studies and the History of Ideas

Contents

Introduction: Theory and Practice
1 Loyalist and Radical Dialogues of the Revolution Controversy: The 'Ambiguities' of 'Popular Address'
2 'I am like that House or Kingdom divided against itself, of which I have read somewhere in the Holy Scriptures': Psychological Disunity, Mentoring from the Heart, and Literary Innovation: Evangelical Dialogues, 1795–1801
3 Religious 'Enthusiasm' and 'Practical' Mentoring: Dialogic Responses to the Blagdon Controversy
4 Education and Philosophical Persuasion: The Dialogues of Dr Alexander Thomson and Sir Uvedale Price
5 'Interrogative' Philosophizing and the Ambiguities of Egalitarian Dialogues: Sir Richard Phillips' Four Dialogues between an Oxford Tutor and a Disciple of the Common-Sense Philosophy (1824) and Robert Southey's Sir Thomas More: Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829)
6 Conversation and 'Enlightened Philosophy': The 'Dialectical Comedies' of Thomas Love Peacock and Imaginary Conversations (1824–9) of Walter Savage Landor
Postscript

Reviews

'Wallbank’s study offers an important addition to Romanticism criticism. It will enrich our understanding of the cultural landscape of the period through its careful attention to the textual and political nuances of a genre whose important role has too often been overlooked.' Paul Keen, Carleton University

Related titles

• Adam Ferguson: Philosophy, Politics and Society
• The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1776–1832
• The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain: Mammoth and Megalonyx
• Hume and the Enlightenment
• John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon
• The Language of Whiggism: Liberty and Patriotism, 1802–1830
• Mary Robinson and the Genesis of Romanticism: Literary Dialogues and Debts, 1784–1821
• Representing Humanity in the Age of Enlightenment
• Romantic Localities: Europe Writes Place
• Romantic Marginality: Nation and Empire on the Borders of the Page
• Sociability and Cosmopolitanism: Social Bonds on the Fringes of the Enlightenment
• William Godwin and the Theatre
• Writing the Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic Colonialism

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