Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation

Peter Gibian explores the key role played by Oliver Wendell Holmes in what was known as America’s Age of Conversation. He was both a model and an analyst of the dynamic conversational form which became central to many areas of mid-nineteenth-century life. Holmes’ multivoiced writings can serve as a key to open up the closed interiors of Victorian America, whether in saloons or salons, parlours or clubs, hotels or boarding-houses, schoolrooms or doctors’ offices. Combining social, intellectual, medical, legal and literary history with close textual analysis, and setting Holmes in dialogue with Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Fuller, Alcott and finally with his son, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, Gibian radically redefines the context for our understanding of the major literary works of the American Renaissance.

• This is an original study of Holmes and of conversation as a cultural mode • Also discusses canonical authors: Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Alcott • The book is written in clear, accessible prose

Part I. Opening the Conversation: 1. The conversation of a culture: strange powers of speech; Part II. Holmes in the Conversation of his Culture: 2. ‘To change the order of conversation’; 3. ‘Collisions of discourse’ I: the electrodynamics of conversation; 4. ‘Collisions of discourse’ II: electric and oceanic currents of conversation; 5. A conversational approach to truth: the doctor in dialogue with contemporary truth-sayers; 6. Conversation and ‘therapeutic nihilism’: the doctor in dialogue with contemporary medicine; 7. The self in conversation: the doctor in dialogue with contemporary psychology; Part III. The Two Poles of Conversation: 8. The bipolar dynamics of Holmes’ household dialogues: levity and gravity; 9. Holmes’ house divided: house-keeping and house-breaking; 10. ‘Cutting off the communication’: fixations and falls for the walled-in self: Holmes in dialogue with Sterne, Dickens, and Melville; 11. Breaking the house of romance: Holmes in dialogue with Hawthorne; Part IV. Closing the Conversation: 12. Conclusions: Holmes Senior in dialogue with Holmes Junior.