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.
About the Author: Katie Halsey is an AHRC postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. She works on the Reading Experience Database, 1450-1945, and was previously a Teaching Fellow in Romantic Literature at St Andrews University. Recent publications include 'Critics as a Race are Donkeys': Margaret Oliphant, Critic or Common Reader?, Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, 2 (2007), 42-69; The Blush of Modesty or the Blush of Shame? Reading Jane Austen's Blushes, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 42.3 (July 2006): 226-238; Spectral Texts in Mansfield Park, in British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: authorship, history, politics, ed. Cora Kaplan and Jennie Batchelor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 48-61. Her monograph on Jane Austen and her readers will be published in 2008. Jane Slinn studied for a Ph.D. at King's College, Cambridge on the place of emotion on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's aesthetics. She has written articles on Romantic aesthetics and sympathy and the aesthetic writings of Adam Smith and David Hume. With Katie Halsey, she organised the conference from which this collection of essays is drawn. She is now training to be a barrister.