Godwin and the Book explores a network of controversies concerning the relationship of media form to social futurity in Romanticperiod Britain through the writing of the notorious philosophernovelist William Godwin (1756–1836). It offers a fresh reading of Godwin’s fiftyyear 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. In the process, it highlights many wider debates that marked out the culture of this period – including disagreements over the physiology of the mind, the ethics of novelreading, and the social consequences of death – and considers how these debates were intertwined with the formal development of British prose in the period.
Godwin and the Book explores a network of controversies concerning the relationship of media form to social futurity in Romanticperiod Britain through the writing of the notorious philosophernovelist William Godwin (1756–1836). It offers a fresh reading of Godwin’s fiftyyear 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. In the process, it highlights many wider debates that marked out the culture of this period – including disagreements over the physiology of the mind, the ethics of novelreading, and the social consequences of death – and considers how these debates were intertwined with the formal development of British prose in the period.
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