Godwin and the Book: Imagining Media, 1783-1836

By J Louise McCray

Book Overview

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 (1756-1836). It offers 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. 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 novel-reading, and the social consequences of death - and considers how these debates were intertwined with the formal development of British prose in the period.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1474475779
• ISBN13: 9781474475778
• Release Date: February 2023
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.67 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 9.2"