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  1. Home
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  3. Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation
  • Cited by 14
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
September 2009
Print publication year:
2001
Online ISBN:
9780511485503
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511485503
Series:
Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (127)
Subjects:
Literature, Area Studies, American Literature, American Studies, Literary Theory, History, History of Ideas and Intellectual History
Information

Book description

Peter Gibian explores the key role played by Oliver Wendell Holmes in what was known as America's 'Age of Conversation'. He was both a model and an analyst of the dynamic conversational form, which became central to many areas of mid-nineteenth-century life. Holmes' multivoiced writings can serve as a key to open up the closed interiors of Victorian America, whether in saloons or salons, parlours or clubs, hotels or boarding-houses, schoolrooms or doctors' offices. Combining social, intellectual, medical, legal and literary history with close textual analysis, and setting Holmes in dialogue with Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Fuller, Alcott and finally with his son, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, Gibian radically redefines the context for our understanding of the major literary works of the American Renaissance.

Reviews

"They are 'dazzling' in the breadth of their allusions and striking in their wit and verbal originality. [It] is a rich book ... extensive in its courage and often penetrating in its analysis of a forgotten figure. If it sends new readers to Holmes's trilogy, one of the hidden treasures of American writing, then it will truly have done a service." Nineteenth Century Literature

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