Conversable Worlds

Around 1700 a new commercial society was emerging that thought of its values as the product of exchanges between citizens. A welter of publications-periodical essays, novels, and poetry-enjoined the virtues of conversation and were enthusiastically discussed in book clubs and literary societies, creating their own conversable worlds.

The divide between the sciences and the humanities, which often seem to speak entirely different languages, has its roots in the way intellectual disciplines developed in the long eighteenth century. As various fields of study became defined and to some degree professionalized, their ways of communicating evolved into an increasingly specialist vocabulary. Chemists, physicists, philosophers, and poets argued about whether their discourses should become more and more specialised, or whether they should aim to remain intelligible to the layperson. In this interdisciplinary study, Robin Valenza shows how Isaac Newton, Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth invented new intellectual languages. By offering a much-needed account of the rise of the modern disciplines, Robin Valenza shows why the sciences and humanities diverged so strongly, and argues that literature has a special role in navigating between the languages of different areas of thought.

The Enlightenment era saw European thinkers increasingly concerned with what it meant to be human. This collection of essays traces the concept of ‘humanity’ through revolutionary politics, feminist biography, portraiture, explorer narratives, libertine and Orientalist fiction, the philosophy of conversation and musicology.

This book examines how Samuel Johnson was assimilated by later writers, ranging from James Boswell to Samuel Beckett. It is as much about these writers as Johnson himself, showing how they found their own space, in part, through their response to Johnson, which helped shape their writing and view of contemporary literature.

The Spiritual Lives and Manuscript Cultures of Eighteenth-Century English Women explores the vital and unexplored ways in which women's life writings acted to undergird, guide, and indeed shape religious communities. Through an exploration of various significant but understudied personal relationships- including mentorship by older women, spiritual friendship, and care for nonbiological children-the book demonstrates the multiple ways in which women were active in writing religious communities. The women discussed here belonged to communities that habitually communicated through personal writing. At the same time, their acts of writing were creative acts, powerful to build and shape religious communities: these women wrote religious community. The book consists of a series of interweaving case studies and focuses on Catherine Talbot (1721-70), Anne Steele (1717-78), and Ann Bolton (1743-1822), and on their literary interactions with friends and family. Considered together, these subjects and sources allow comparison across denomination, for Talbot was Anglican, Steele a Baptist, and Bolton a Methodist. Further, it considers women's life writings as spiritual legacy, as manuscripts were preserved by female friends and family members and continued to function in religious communities after the death of their authors. Various strands of enquiry weave through the book: questions of gender and religion, themselves inflected by denomination; themes related to life writings and manuscript cultures; and the interplay between the writer as individual and her relationships and communal affiliations. The result is a variegated and highly textured account of eighteenth-century women's spiritual and writing lives.

Andrew O. Winckles is Assistant Professor of CORE Curriculum (Interdisciplinary Studies) at Adrian College. Angela Rehbein is Associate Professor of English at West Liberty University.

For the last two centuries, literature has tested the authority of the individual and the community. With a historical as well as an interpretative emphasis, Bromwich explores this tension. He shows why the public-mindedness of the eighteenth century is as limited a model for readers now as the individualism of the nineteenth century.