The Conversation Of Gentlemen Considered In Most Ways That Make Their Mutual Company Agreeable Or Disagreeable

A work written in dialogue format designed to impart the best methods for carrying on a polite conversation.

A work written in dialogue format designed to impart the best methods for carrying on a polite conversation.

Arguments about the place and practice of the duel in early modern England were widespread. The distinguished intellectual historian Markku Peltonen examines this debate, and show how the moral and ideological status of duelling was discussed within a much larger cultural context of courtesy, civility and politeness. The advocates of the duel, following Italian and French examples, contended that it maintained and enhanced politeness; its critics by contrast increasingly severed duelling from civility, and this separation became part of a vigorous attempt in the late seventeenth century and beyond to redefine civility, politeness and indeed the nature and evolution of Englishness. To understand the duel is to understand much more fully some crucial issues in the cultural and ideological history of Stuart England, and Markku Peltonen's study will thus engage the attention of a very wide audience of historians and cultural and literary scholars.

"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.