The title of this seminar, borrowed from Mee’s eponymous study (2011), aims at exploring the diverse discursive facets of communication, dialogue, and sociability in the long Eighteenth Century. Against the backdrop of the emerging middle-class public sphere and political compromise, of the cult of sensibility as well as, towards the latter part of the century, Pre-Romantic and Revolutionary trends, there is a concern with conversation and communication informing discourses on politeness, aesthetics, rhetoric, moral philosophy as much as literature. Beginning with selected writings of Shaftesbury and Addison’s periodical essays, we will study a range of authors and genres, concluding with Hazlitt’s essays.
A substantial amount of the class reading will be available through Moodle.
Further Reading:
Mee, Jon (2011), Conversable Worlds. Literature, Contention, and Community 1762 to 1830. Oxford .
