Godwin and the Book

Examines the place of media technology in the literary and intellectual history of Romantic-era Britain

• Explores the literary figuration of media technology and its use
• Offers a fresh reading of Godwin’s corpus, which involves an unusual claim about its fundamental consistency across time and generic boundaries
• Examines major controversies of the period, including: the physiology of the mind; the ethics of novel-reading; practical reading advice; the nature of truth; the nature of afterlife
• Draws attention to the enormous impact of protestant dissent on the literature and philosophy of the Romantic period

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.