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
6 - Conversation and ‘Enlightened Philosophy’: The ‘Dialectical Comedies’ of Thomas Love Peacock and Imaginary Conversations (1824–9) of Walter Savage Landor
- 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
Although the increasingly ‘critical attitude’ of the reading public had been largely fuelled by the unrelenting dissemination of fiercely competing and frequently highly didactic discourses of the Revolution Controversy, overtly moralizing religious propaganda, and the didactic dissemination of all ‘received ideologies’ (as Jonathan Rose has demonstrated), suspicions about competing claims to truth in this period also had their origins in an increasing disdain for the earlier influences of ‘New Rhetoricians’ such as George Campbell, Joseph Priestley and Hugh Blair. ‘New Rhetoricians’ attempted, in the words of Campbell's The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776)
from the science of human nature, to ascertain with greater precision, the radical principles of that art, whose object it is, by the use of language, to operate on the soul of the hearer, in the way of informing, convincing, pleasing, moving, or persuading.
By the end of the eighteenth century, however, such tactics came to be viewed with the same mounting scepticism as that being bestowed upon didacticism. For Coleridge, rhetorical principles aimed specifically at ‘convincing, pleasing, moving, or persuading’ could effectively reason anybody into believing anything – just as the ‘eristic’ methods of the Sophists in Plato's dialogues had demonstrated. As James Mulvihill has observed, because of such ‘false rationalism’ and
sensationalism … the sophist may pass off as plausible what is untenable, positing probable identity among categorically distinct terms so that even absolute qualities may seem to meet ‘half way’.
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- Information
- Dialogue, Didacticism and the Genres of DisputeLiterary Dialogues in the Age of Revolution, pp. 187 - 216Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014