A Dialogue Between Clara Neville And Louisa Mills On Loyalty C Recommended To The Attention Of Every Female In Great Britain By One Of Their Countrywomen I E Elizabeth Dawbarn The Elder

This book offers the first full-length study of philosophical dialogue during the English Enlightenment. It explains why important philosophers - Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Berkeley and Hume - and innumerable minor translators, imitators and critics wrote in and about dialogue during the eighteenth century; and why, after Hume, philosophical dialogue either falls out of use or undergoes radical transformation. Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment describes the extended, heavily coded, and often belligerent debate about the nature and proper management of dialogue; and it shows how the writing of philosophical fictions relates to the rise of the novel and the emergence of philosophical aesthetics. Novelists such as Fielding, Sterne, Johnson and Austen are placed in a philosophical context, and philosophers of the empiricist tradition in the context of English literary history.

"Acharnians" is the earliest of the existent comedies of Aristophanes, produced in 425 BCE. It is a direct attack on the folly of war. The story deals with an Athenian farmer, Dikaiopolis, who surprisingly obtains a private peace treaty with the Spartans and enjoys the benefits of peace despite resistance from some of his fellow Athenians. This drama is celebrated for its absurd humor and its innovative appeal for an end to the Peloponnesian War.

From his close analysis of the works of the era's great philosophers, Dykstal argues that the dialogue as a literary form helped to develop, and subsequently transform, the public sphere in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England."--BOOK JACKET.