Bill Reposting this because of comma in link (thanks, Ivan!): The home of all things literary and Undead, the Open Graves, Open Minds website, www.opengravesopenminds.com is starting to look a bit better, with more content and reports on the Bram Stoker... more
Bill added a paper
Bill The home of all things literary and Undead, the Open Graves, Open Minds website, www.opengravesopenminds,com is starting to look a bit better, with more content and reports on the Bram Stoker Symposium. Still can't alter certain things, though, or ... more
Bill The home of all things literary and Undead, the Open Graves, Open Minds website, www.opengravesopenminds,com is starting to look a bit better, with more content and reports on the Bram Stoker Sympos... more
Alumnus, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics
Thesis Title: ‘The Commerce of Light’: The Eighteenth-Century Dialogue, Communicative Reason, and the Formation of the Early English Novel
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Dr Hamish Mathison
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About
I have recently been awarded my PhD in English Literature by research which I have been studying for part-time at the University of Sheffield. My research is on the eighteenth-century dialogue as a genre and on the dialogic nature of Enlightenment thought in general. I am also doing research and publishing on Richard Hoggart and on contemporary 'dark romance' fiction, of vampires and zombies.
My thesis begins with an exploration of eighteenth-century theories of language, many of which posit an originary dialogue. I consider Mandeville’s theories in The Fable of the Bees, James Harris’s Hermes, Lord Monboddo’s Of the Origin and Progress of Language, and, briefly, Adam Smith, Condillac, and Rousseau.
The second chapter considers the harmonious, consensual, and hedonistic nature of some eighteenth-century dialogues by looking at Aphra Behn’s translation of Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, A Discovery of New Worlds; Shaftesbury’s The Moralists; Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees once more; and Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
The thesis then explores the antagonistic, polemic nature of dialogues, looking at Berkeley’s Alciphron, and some neglected dialogues of the 1790s, both radical and conservative; Thomas Day, Sir William Jones, Thomas Spence, and in response, writers such as Hannah More.
Finally, I depict the absorption of the genre into the novel: Richardson’s Pamela, Sarah Fielding’s The Cry, and novels of the 1790s, radical and anti-Jacobin, such as Robert Bage’s Hermsprong, are treated in depth. The overall argument reveals a new facet of the ‘Rise of the Novel’ debate; my thesis being that the richness of the eighteenth-century dialogue, owing much to the dialogic context within which it flourished, contributed significantly to the development of the novel.
