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“The use of conversation”: William Godwin’s conversable world and romantic sociability
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Mee, Jon (2011) “The use of conversation”: William Godwin’s conversable world and romantic sociability. Studies in Romanticism, Vol.50 (No.4). pp. 567-590. ISSN 0039-3762.
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Abstract
WILLIAM GODWIN'S DIARY HAS THE FOLLOWING ENTRY FOR NOVEMber 22, 1791: "Holcroft calls: talk of the Widow. Webb calls: talk of necessity virtue & perception. Call on Jacob, fr. Sup at Hollis's, talk of David, Canaanites, and the use of conversation." (1) Around a century earlier, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a newly commercial culture had begun to think of its activities across the range of human endeavors as a kind of general "conversation," this metaphorical shift being accompanied by the promotion (in handbooks and other places) of the social practice of conversation. In this context the question of the uses of conversation became, long before Godwin's time, a key issue for inquiries into the unity of the new society and the means of its further development. My particular historical window on this conversation of culture is the Romantic period, roughly speaking 1780 to 1822. For at least one critic, "the conversable world" (the phrase is Hume's) meets one of its ends in Romanticism, where it runs into a wall of "solitude and the sublime." My own perspective is closer to David Simpson's in so far as I think the conversational turn remains one of the defining shifts into modernity. (2) From this perspective, Romanticism may have asked new questions about the ends of conversation, but it was far from signalling the end of the conversable world. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's conversation poems and William Wordsworth's attempt to reorient poetry towards "the language of conversation" in the preface to their Lyrical Ballads may serve as a provisional proof of this view, although the peculiar ends to which they put conversation are not my concerns in this essay. (3) My primary focus will be on the philosopher and novelist William Godwin.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||
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Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Studies in Romanticism | ||||
Publisher: | Boston University | ||||
ISSN: | 0039-3762 | ||||
Official Date: | 2011 | ||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | Vol.50 | ||||
Number: | No.4 | ||||
Page Range: | pp. 567-590 | ||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access |
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