| Focusing on texts written during several high-profile public controversies of the late 18th-century and Romantic period in order to map the intersections between literary aesthetics and the politics of popular discourse, this dissertation argues that such texts became a primary vehicle for understanding public writing and Britain's diverse, contentious and expanding reading audiences. I argue that contemporary writers understood public debate as a complex discourse, sitting at the convergence of several distinct areas of cultural activity: it was a forum in which literary, political, and philosophical ideals were all forced to adapt to the expectations of a continuously changing public audience. Thus, my dissertation conceives of the literary practice of public debate as both a medium for political exchange and an aesthetic proving ground, arguing that it facilitated the practical and ideological changes in writers' attitudes toward public discourse required for the development of new, publicly oriented, and highly politicized literature.;Chapter one looks at the explosion of public contention during the first decade of George III's reign, and analyzes the aesthetic language used by John Wilkes in his weekly North Briton. Chapter two focuses on the Revolution Debate in England of the early 1790's, considering the overall role of figurative language and persuasive rhetoric in the debate before offering a reading of both Edmund Burke's and Thomas Paine's confrontational deployments of the figure of the body politic. Chapter three considers the relationship between poetics and popular political discourse in the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley, arguing that Shelley's concept of unacknowledged legislation arises out of his skeptical reflections on the transformative potential of public debate. Chapter four turns to the German philosophical tradition, considering Immanuel Kant's engagement with public debate in his critical and post-critical philosophy, and examining one of Kant's lesser-known polemical pamphlets to observe several complications that arise when the philosopher attempts to put his theories of public debate into practice. |
