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Examines the place of media technology in the literary and intellectual history of Romantic-era Britain
Godwin and the Book explores a network of controversies concerning the relationship of media form to social futurity in Britain in the Romantic era through the writing of the notorious philosopher-novelist William Godwin (1756-1836). It presents a fresh reading of Godwin's fifty-year corpus, using evidence from his fiction, philosophy and essays to argue that, throughout his career, he figured books and reading in particular ways in order to defend a set of inherited beliefs about intellectual perfectibility. It highlights many wider debates that marked out the culture of this period - including disagreements over the physiology of the mind, the ethics of novel-reading and the social consequences of death - and considers how these debates were intertwined with the formal development of contemporary British prose.
J. Louise McCray is a writer and critic whose research focuses on media, fiction and intellectual history.
List of contents
Introduction
1. The Matter of the Reader:
Materialism and Private Judgement 2. The Ethics of Novel-Reading:
Fiction and Moral Law 3. The Discipline of Reading:
'Enquiry' and Religious Dissent 4. Truth and Social Media:
Books and Intellectual Regulation
5. Books, Bodies and Monuments:
Print and Perfectibility Bibliography
Index
About the author
J. Louise McCray received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh where she was a tutor in English Literature. Her publications include 'Novel-Reading, Ethics, and William Godwin in the 1830s', in Studies in Romanticism and ''Peril in the means of its diffusion': William Godwin on Truth and Social Media', article forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Ideas (both in press).
Summary
Godwin and the Book explores a network of controversies concerning the relationship of media form to social futurity in Romantic-period Britain through the writing of the notorious philosopher-novelist William Godwin (17561836).
