"As traced by Roger D. Sell, literary communication is a process of community-making. As long as literary authors and those responding to them respect each other's human autonomy, literature flourishes as an enjoyable, though often challenging mode of interaction that is truly dialogical in spirit. This gives rise to author-respondent communities whose members represent existential commonalities blended together with historical differences. These heterogeneous literary communities have a larger social significance, in that they have long served as counterweights to the hegemonic tendencies of modernity, and more recently to postmodernity's well-intentioned but restrictive politics of identity. In post-postmodern times, their ethos is increasingly one of pleasurable egalitarianism. The despondent anti-hedonism of the twentieth century intelligentia can now seem rather dated. Some of the papers selected for this volume develop Sell's ideas in mainly theoretical terms. But most of them offer detailed criticism of particular anglophone writers, ranging from Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and other poets and dramatists of the early modern period, through Wordsworth and Coleridge, to Dickens, Pinter, and Rushdie"--.

• Literary Communication as Dialogue
• Editorial page
• FILLM Advisory Board
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowlegements
• Introduction
  • 1.
  • 2.
  • 3.
  • 4.
  • 5.
  • 6.
• Chapter 1. Postmodernity, literary pragmatics, mediating criticism: Meanings within a large circle of communicants
  • 1.
  • 2.
  • 3.
  • 4.
  • 5.
  • 6.
  • 7.
  • 8.
  • 9.
  • Acknowledgements
• Chapter 2. What is literary communication and what is a literary community?
  • Acknowledgements
• Chapter 3. Gadamer, Habermas, and a re-humanized literary scholarship
  • Acknowledgements
• Chapter 4. Sir John Beaumont and his three audiences
  • 1. Biographical considerations
  • 2. The broadest audience
  • 3. The audience of fellow-Catholics
  • 4. The audience of potential converts in high places
• Chapter 5. Dialogicality and ethics: Four cases of literary address
  • 1. Towards a humanized dialogue analysis
  • 2. The dialogicality of literature
  • 3. An autobiographer’s address
  • 4. A poet’s address
  • 5. A novelist’s address
  • 6. A dramatist’s address
  • Acknowledgements
• Chapter 6. Encouraging the readers of tomorrow: Books and empathy
  • Acknowledgements
• Chapter 7. Dialogue versus silencing: Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
  • 1. A communicational tyrant?
  • 2. The invitation to readers of The Rime
  • 3. Readers’ responses
  • 4. Green values
  • 5. The conversational readjustment of 1817
  • 6. The continuing conversation
  • Acknowledgements
• Chapter 8. Cultural memory and the communicational criticism of literature
  • 1. Communicational criticism
  • 2. Cultural memory
  • 3. Negative capability: Postmodern novelists
  • 4. Varieties of community-making: An early modern poet
  • 5. Cultural memory and communication
  • Acknowledgements
• Chapter 9. Herbert’s considerateness: A communicational assessment
  • Acknowledgements
• Chapter 10. In dialogue with the ageing Wordsworth
  • Acknowledgements
• Chapter 11. A communicational criticism for post-postmodern times
  • Acknowledgements
• Chapter 12. Review: Till Kinzel and Jarmila Mildorf (eds). Imaginary dialogues in American literature and philosophy: Beyond the mainstream
  • Acknowledgements
• Chapter 13. Political and hedonic re-contextualizations: Prince Charles’s Spanish journey in Beaumont, Jonson, and Middleton
  • 1. History
  • 2. Formal features
  • 3. Dialogicality
  • Acknowledgements
• Chapter 14. Where do literary authors belong?: A post-postmodern answer
  • Acknowledgements
• Chapter 15. Honour dishonoured: The communicational workings of early Stuart tragedy and tragi-comedy
  • 1. Massinger’s The Roman Actor
  • 2. Plays by Middleton, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, and Ford
  • 3. Epilogue
  • Acknowledgements
• Chapter 16. Dialogue and literature
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Dialogue in literature
  • 3. Literature as dialogue
  • 4. Literary dialogicality and communicational ethics
• Chapter 17. Ben Jonson’s Epigram 101, “Inviting a Friend to Supper”: Literary pleasures immediately tasted
  • 1.
  • 2.
  • 3.
  • 4.
  • Acknowledgements
• Chapter 18. Literature, human commonalities, and cultural differences: Stability and change
  • 1. Universality
  • 2. Literary-historical periods
  • 3. Shakespeare’s co-adaptations
  • 4. Cultural differences and human commonalities over time
  • Acknowledgements
• Chapter 19. Two opposed modes of communication between Dickens and his readers
  • Acknowledgements
• References
  • Manuscripts
  • Printed materials
• Index