Authors in Dialogue

This book gathers together essays and papers written over a time span of around fifteen years. Partly retitled and revised, they were selected for the book because they all focus on the dialogic element in a series of literary works produced in the period extending from late Romanticism to early Modernism. By «dialogic» the author means the sharing of common preoccupations, the recursiveness of motifs, themes and patterns, the emergence of constants, a network of explicit or hidden confrontations. Dialogues may then arise between an author and other contemporaries in the form of an explicit theoretical discussion in letters or critical essays; or implicitly, and allusively, in inventive negotiations that respond to previous works through parody or adaptation. After a concise introduction stating the author’s theoretical debt to the insightful theories of the Russian semiotician and typologist Yuri Lotman, single essays discuss Byron, Ruskin, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Hopkins, Ouida, Joyce and T. S. Eliot.