Creative Dialogues with Textual Partners, Past and Present

Abstract

This chapter considers the writings of Thomas More and Antonio Gramsci. It demonstrates some of the similarities in the political and intellectual methods that generated their prison writing and helped to create their posthumous reputations. These conceptual changes were partly owing to a shared heritage of classical learning that conditioned how their thought processes are reflected in their forms of expression. The mental habits of both polemicists were formed by their literary training in dialectic: they each made creative use of contrast rather than comparison or similitude. In prison these tendencies were exacerbated, as different forms of dialogue and dialectic enabled each writer to reassess the ideas for which he was being persecuted and to sustain his resolve and humanity in family relationships. More's and Gramsci's prison writings therefore engage with existential themes and the politics of authority, yet at the same time they reflect the warmth and importance of family relationships in the dialogic forms of personal correspondence. Their prison writings have been crucial to the political impact of their lives.