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." Holmes was both a model and an analyst of the dynamic conversational form that became central to many areas of mid-nineteenth-century life. His multi-voiced writings can serve as a key to open up the closed interiors of Victorian America, whether in saloons or salons, parlors 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."--Jacket.