Dialogue, Didacticism and the Genres of Dispute: Literary Dialogues in the Age of Revolution: The Enlightenment World

Introduction: Theory and Practice; Chapter 1 Loyalist and Radical Dialogues of the Revolution Controversy: The ‘Ambiguities’ of ‘Popular Address’; Chapter 2 ‘I am Like that House or Kingdom Divided Against Itself, of Which I have Read Somewhere in the Holy Scriptures’: Psychological Disunity, Mentoring from the Heart, and Literary Innovation: Evangelical Dialogues, 1795–1801; Chapter 3 Religious ‘Enthusiasm’ and ‘Practical’ Mentoring: Dialogic Responses to the Blagdon Controversy; Chapter 4 Education and Philosophical Persuasion: The Dialogues of Dr Alexander Thomson and Sir Uvedale Price; Chapter 5 ‘Interrogative’ Philosophizing and the Ambiguities of Egalitarian Dialogues: Sir Richard Phillips’s Four Dialogues Between an Oxford Tutor and a Disciple of the Common-Sense Philosophy (1824) and Robert Southey’s Sir Thomas More: Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829); Chapter 6 Conversation and ‘Enlightened Philosophy’: The ‘Dialectical Comedies’ of Thomas Love Peacock and Imaginary Conversations (1824–9) of Walter Savage Landor;

Dialogue was a pivotal genre for the spread of Enlightenment ideas. Focusing on non-canonical British writers Wallbank examines the evolution of dialogue as a genre during the Romantic period.