Reimagining Persuasion in British Romantic Literature (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Solomonescu, Yasmin

Cambridge University Press（2026/08発売）

• 製本 Paperback:紙装版/ペーパーバック版／ページ数 250 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781009785341

Full Description

The theory and practice of persuasion, argues Yasmin Solomonescu, was 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.

Contents

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.