Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- 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's 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
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Introduction: Theory and Practice
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- 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's 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
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
The Romantic age was arguably one of the most exciting and diverse periods of cultural, political and intellectual upheaval in British history. The period witnessed the transition from the relative stability of Church and State agrarian patriarchy to the frenetic pace of urbanization, industrialization, expansion and imperialism of Victorian culture – developments which took place against the backdrop of international warfare, revolution and the rapidly expanding self-consciousness of the working classes through increased literacy and education. Indeed, John Stuart Mill accurately characterized the period as ‘an age of change’ and proclaimed that ‘the nineteenth-century will be known to posterity as the era of one of the greatest revolutions of which history has preserved the remembrance’. But such developments resulted in the emergence of a rich array of competing political, religious and philosophical values, ideas and discourses which became hotly contested in the public arena through sporadic controversies and propaganda wars. Mill argued that such debates were symptomatic of the ‘transitions’ being witnessed, and that fundamentally, disagreements stemmed from the fact that ‘mankind have outgrown old institutions and old doctrines’ but ‘have not yet acquired new ones’. The ‘spirit of the age’, Mill thus proclaimed, was marked by its divisions, the division of men ‘into those who are still what they were, and those who have changed: into men of the present age, and the men of the past.’
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- Information
- Dialogue, Didacticism and the Genres of DisputeLiterary Dialogues in the Age of Revolution, pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014