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54 Table Talk
Get accessWill Bowers is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Thought at Queen Mary University of London. He has published articles in journals such as Essays in Criticism, Modern Philology, and The Review of English Studies; his first monograph, The Italian Idea, was published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press; and he is an editor on the Longman Annotated Poems of Shelley volumes 5 and 6 (expected 2024). His work for the next decade or so will be on two projects: editing the letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley for Oxford University Press and writing a book on dining and its cultures in Romantic literature.
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Published:22 May 2024
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Abstract
Books of table talk are an often ignored and quintessentially Romantic form of criticism. These once popular volumes allow us to broaden our sense of what comprises literary-critical thought—a broadening, paradoxically, which provides a better sense of Romanticism’s major critical preoccupations. Romantic critical media is usually confined to what is written down or formally spoken, but in doing so we miss out on the most common means of opinion. On walks, over dinner, at the pub, and in clubs and societies, conversation was (as it remains) the simplest way of discussing literature. The years 1786 to 1856 constitute the great age of table talk: this chapter outlines the form’s development, before using specific examples to consider how these volumes structure and present criticism. It concludes by putting these volumes back at the centre of Romantic criticism by using them to appreciate anew one of its greatest works: William Hazlitt’s ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ (1823).
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