Godwin and the Book

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 (17561836). 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.