Reimagining Persuasion in British Romantic Literature

At the turn of the nineteenth century, British Romantic writers reconceived the theory and practice of persuasion. This engrossing journey into literary and intellectual history shows how key authors transformed a core concept of their inherited rhetorical tradition, thus boldly reshaping ideas around the persuasiveness of literature itself.

The theory and practice of persuasion, argues Yasmin Solomonescu, were fundamentally reconceived by British Romantic writers at the turn of the nineteenth century. Examining major and lesser-known works by Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt, Jane Austen, William Godwin, William Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley, the author deftly explores the emergence of an important new literature and epistemology of persuasion that allowed for doubt, dissent, and changes of mind. This recalibrated notion of persuasion – a uniquely flexible one – was bound up with eighteenth-century developments encompassing both a crisis of belief and the polarization of political discourse during an age of revolution. Dialoguing with cognate fields such as rhetorical studies, philosophy, and the history of belief, the book makes a compelling case for the Romantic reimagining of persuasion as an unacknowledged impetus for the period's literature, a bridge between literature and rhetorical theory, and a resource for literary criticism and civic life today.