Hints Towards An Essay On Conversation

With the Main Guard The Drums of the Fore and Aft The Man who was The Courting of Dinah Shadd The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney The Taking of Lungtungpen The Madness of Private Ortheris Kipling was one of the most popular writers in the United Kingdom, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.

The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift is a specially commissioned collection of essays. Arranged thematically across a range of topics, this volume will deepen and extend the enjoyment and understanding of Jonathan Swift for students and scholars. The thirteen essays explore crucial dimensions of Swift s life and works. As well as ensuring a broad coverage of Swift s writing - including early and later works as well as the better known and the lesser known - the Companion also offers a way into current critical and theoretical issues surrounding the author. Special emphasis is placed on Swift s vexed relationship with the land of his birth, Ireland; and on his place as a political writer in a highly politicised age. The Companion offers a lucid introduction to these and other issues, and raises new questions about Swift and his world. The volume features a detailed chronology and a guide to further reading.

First published in 1983, Dean Swift is the concluding book in a series of three volumes providing a detailed exploration of the events of Swift’s life. The third volume follows Swift’s life and career from 1714 to 1745 and sets it against the public events of the age, paying close attention to political and economic change, ecclesiastical problems, social issues, and literary history. It traces Swift’s rise to becoming first citizen of Ireland and looks in detail at the composition, publication, and reception of Gulliver’s Travels, as well as many of Swift’s other works, both poetry and prose. It also explores Swift’s later years, his love affairs with Esther Johnson and Esther Vanhomrigh, his complicated friendships with Pope, Lord Bolingbroke, and Archbishop King, and his declining health. Dean Swift is a hugely detailed insight into Swift’s life from 1714 until his death and will be of interest to anyone wanting to find out more about his life and works.

Conversable Worlds addresses the emergence of the idea of 'the conversation of culture'. Around 1700 a new commercial society was emerging that thought of its values as the product of exchanges between citizens. Conversation became increasingly important as a model and as a practice for how community could be created. A welter of publications, in periodical essays, in novels, and in poetry, enjoined the virtues of conversation. These publications were enthusiastically read and discussed in book clubs and literary societies that created their own conversable worlds. From some perspectives, the freedom of a distinctively English conversation allowed for the 'collision' of ideas and sentiments. For others, like Joseph Addison and David Hume, ease of 'flow' was the key issue, and politeness the means of establishing a via media. For Addison and Hume, the feminization of culture promised to make women the sovereigns of what Hume called 'the conversable world'. As the culture seemed to open up to a multitude of voices, anxieties appeared as to how far things should be allowed to go. The unruliness of the crowd threatened to disrupt the channels of communication. There was a parallel fear that mere feminized chatter might replace learning. This book examines the influence of these developments on the idea of literature from 1762 through to 1830. Part I examines the conversational paradigm established by figures like Addison and Hume, and the proliferation of conversable worlds into gatherings like Johnson's Club and Montagu's Bluestocking assemblies. Part II looks at the transition from the eighteenth century to 'Romantic' ideas of literary culture, the question of the withdrawal from mixed social space, the drive to sublimate verbal exchange into forms that retained dialogue without contention in places like Coleridge's 'conversation poems,' and the continuing tensions between ideas of the republic of letters as a space of vigorous exchange as opposed to the organic unfolding of consciousness.

This collection of essays brings together eighteenth-century scholars from a variety of disciplines, to discuss conversation in the eighteenth century as concept and practice. At the heart of the volume is a simple question: are eighteenth-century conceptualisations of the role and purpose of conversation still relevant or useful to scholars and thinkers today? This volume contains essays by leading scholars of the period as well as early career researchers, and answers a need for a broad-ranging discussion of the concept of conversation in the arts, social sciences and humanities. The long eighteenth century is a particularly fruitful starting point for work on this topic, since ideas about conversation permeated all types of writing in this period, from the early forerunners of scientific textbooks to philosophical dialogues. The collection covers an exceptionally wide range of long-eighteenth-century authors, artists, lawmakers, texts and works of art, and, although the focus of the volume is largely on eighteenth-century Britain, the volume takes note of the rich relationships between continental European thought and British intellectual life in the period, and of the influence of British ideas in the newly independent American republic.

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.

The Crisis of Courtesy explores the metamorphosis of British courtesy-literature from the 17th to the 19th centuries. It shows how the preoccupation with conduct provided the subject-matter of such diverse literary forms as poetry, the essay and the novel.