While the question of how rhetoric lost authority to modern philosophical and scientific inquiry has drawn much scrutiny, we have paid less attention to how values that were once bound up with rhetoric were rearticulated after its demise. This volume explores how persuasion ceased to be the seemingly self-evident objective of rhetoric and became, instead, a variable and substantive focus for discussion in its own right. After rhetoric ceded much of its centrality to logic and empirical procedures, the significance and implications of persuasion were the subject of renewed attention in a range of different fields, including philosophy, law, poetry, novels, botany, cultural criticism, historiography, political thought, and public lecturing. Persuasion after Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century and Romanticism maps how values of persuasion were adapted and diversified in ways that still resonate with current arguments about conviction, understanding, and belief. Contributors address the figurations of persuasion in a range of theorists and writers, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, and Mary Wollstonecraft, to Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Campbell, William Hazlitt, Heinrich Heine, William Lloyd Garrison, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. This collection offers a detailed account of persuasive interests at the threshold of modernity. It also prompts us to rethink persuasion now that its continued efficacy seems at risk in a fragmented public sphere.

The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose is a full-length essay collection devoted entirely to British Romantic nonfiction prose. Organized into eight parts, each containing between five and nine chapters arranged alphabetically, the Handbook weaves together familiar and unfamiliar texts, events, and authors, and invites readers to draw comparisons, reimagine connections and disconnections, and confront frequently stark contradictions, within British Romantic nonfiction prose, but also in its relationship to British Romanticism more generally, and to the literary practices and cultural contexts of other periods and countries. The Handbook builds on previous scholarship in the field, considers emerging trends and evolving methodologies, and suggests future areas of study. Throughout the emphasis is on lucid expression rather than gnomic declaration, and on chapters that offer, not a dutiful survey, but evaluative assessments that keep an eye on the bigger picture yet also dwell meaningfully on specific paradoxes and the most telling examples. Taken as a whole the volume demonstrates the energy, originality, and diversity at the crux of British Romantic nonfiction prose. It vigorously challenges the traditional construction of the British Romantic movement as focused too exclusively on the accomplishments of its poets, and it reveals the many ways in which scholars of the period are steadily broadening out and opening up delineations of British Romanticism in order to encompass and thoroughly evaluate the achievements of its nonfiction prose writers.

This reference provides critical overviews and bibliographic information for all major and many minor British and American rhetoricians of the eighteenth century.

This reference work provides bibliographic details for students of 18th-century studies.