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The Conversation
The Conversation
Kate McLoughlin, Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford

Silence: a brief literary history

When Children Are Asleep by Thomas Faed (1885). Walker Art Gallery

Literature expresses complex and nuanced ideas – the powerful feelings that define us as human beings and the detailed observations that illuminate all aspects of our lives. It does so with words put together with consummate skill.

So, surely silence is a nothingness, an affront to the communication of both rational argument and strong emotion – literature’s opposite, even its anathema?

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