Autorentext

Yasmin Solomonescu is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame. She the author of a previous monograph, John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination (2014), and is in addition the editor of multiple works which include (with Stefan Uhlig) Persuasion after Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century and Romanticism (2024), the winner of the Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize from the International Conference on Romanticism.

Klappentext

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.

Inhalt

Introduction. From Perswasion to persuasion: belief without absolutes; 1. Eddying about thoughts: paradigms of persuasion in De Quincey and Hazlitt; 2. Plausible tales: persuasion and legal conviction in Godwin and Wordsworth; 3. Marriages of mind: intimate persuasions in Austen; 4. Revolutions in opinion: the poetics of persuasion in Shelley; Coda. Persuasion among others; Bibliography; Index.