Yasmin Solomonescu is Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Reimagining Persuasion in British Romantic Literature, just out from Cambridge University Press, and of John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination (2014). She is also the editor of multiple works including, with Stefan Uhlig, Persuasion after Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century and Romanticism (2024), winner of the Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize from the International Conference on Romanticism. With Brian McGrath, she co-edits the Romantic Circles Praxis series of critical volumes.
1) How did you first become interested in persuasion?
I originally studied to become a journalist, so I have a longstanding interest in the operations of language in the world. I pivoted to English for my postgraduate work but focused on the very public-facing career of John Thelwall and his efforts to promote democratic reforms through an array of genres and techniques. From there I became interested in wider cultural invocations of “persuasion” as a goal of writing or speaking and its differences from “conviction.” The real gateway to the book was William Godwin’s Things As They Are, which explores the ambivalent efficacy of the “plausible tale” as a means of influence. Writing an article about that allowed me to examine one facet of the Romantic uptake of the classical rhetorical tradition, specifically Ciceronian ideas about plausibility; but it also made me want to look beyond the persistence and adaptation of that tradition and to consider instead the ramifying iterations of the concept and practice of persuasion in the period’s literature.
2) In what ways did understandings of persuasion change during the Romantic period?
The writers I examine all emphasize the worth of a flexible and ideally self-conscious mode of persuasion: one open to change without being merely changeful. In that regard, they break with rhetoricians including George Campbell and Hugh Blair, who defined persuasion chiefly as an affective supplement to rational assent (“conviction”), but they also break with the age-old tendency to regard persuasion as merely a seductive, potentially specious proxy for such assent (think of John Milton’s Belial, who with “persuasive accent” can “make the worse appear / The better reason”). With the writers I address, persuasion comes to denote instead a kind of belief that allows for doubt, dissent, and changes of mind. They all envision beliefs without absolutes that are not just personally or culturally relative. In this they are responding to theorization of probable “perswasion” in John Locke and David Hume, but also reckoning further with its nature and stakes. They are also responding to the extreme polarization of public discourse in the period, shifting legal protocols of truth and evidence, and a new sense of historical situatedness, among other things.
3) How did you select your chapters’ principal subjects: William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen and Percy Shelley?
In A Rhetoric of Motives, Kenneth Burke remarks that “wherever there is ‘meaning,’ there is ‘persuasion.’” Accurate as this may be, not all Romantic writers were invested in reconceptualizing persuasion. I focus on those I could identify who were so invested, and who variously theorize, represent, and perform it across a range of works. Hazlitt, De Quincey, Godwin, Wordsworth, Austen, and Shelley all express dissatisfaction with the rigidity and self-assurance with which we often hold beliefs about contestable issues, and they also share a sense of the limited social and political efficacy of such “conviction” and its tendency to didacticism. Some share an early formation in rational Dissent, and they are all to some extent familiar with classical and/or Enlightenment rhetorical theory and philosophy. In the introduction, two more writers feature prominently, Hume and George Campbell, who allow me to delineate the newly problematic idea of persuasion’s appeal to the will through the passions, with which the book’s core authors are variously engaged.
4) What are the most important things we gain from recovering Romantic understandings of persuasion?
Samuel Johnson remarks in his Dictionary that “Persuasion seems rather applicable to the passions, and argument to the reason; but this is not always observed.” One thing we gain from recovering Romantic understandings of persuasion is a necessary elaboration on Johnson’s sense of departures from standard usage. I think, and I hope I show, that this opens up new readings of a range of canonical and lesser-known works across poetry, fiction, and philosophical prose, from Hazlitt’s posthumously published essays and Shelley’s “Satire upon Satire” to Austen’s teenage writings and completed novels. These works show in turn how the medium of print was particularly well suited to representing and enacting malleable modes of persuasion. Another thing I hope we gain from this recovery is a sense that our enduring narratives of a schism between literature and rhetoric in the period don’t entirely hold from the vantage of a reimagined persuasion. Most broadly, I hope we gain the possibility of at least conceptualizing more flexible beliefs today, however culturally devalued they may be. In particular, persuasion need not be the bugbear of literary criticism, as we either seek out more seemingly reliable scientific or computational methods or else lean into strong convictions. For some, it might be tempting to instead reflect further on the relevance of a Romantic understanding of malleable persuasion for contemporary critical practice.
5) What new projects are you currently working on?
A term that comes up repeatedly in Reimagining Persuasion is “perspective,” and it seems, like “persuasion,” to have been subject to greater nuance in the period that we’ve reckoned with, while also underpinning our critical pronouncements in significant ways. We tend to locate the significant revolutions in perspectival thought in the Italian Renaissance (with the invention of linear perspective) and in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (with the perspectivism of Friedrich Nietzsche and its various postmodern successors). But I think there was an intervening Romantic or broadly pre-Nietzschean renegotiation of perspective, as both a cognitive and a literary phenomenon, that merits closer attention. Reconsidering perspective in this way means examining cultural and intellectual intersections among literature, rhetoric, art history, and astronomy (telescopy in particular), as well as the contexts of imperial expansion and exploitation. I’m working my way into this project through a few articles: one on perspective and planetary consciousness in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, for a bicentennial collection of essays; another on the perspective-splitting induced by verbal and even visual puns in some poems by Percy Shelley. I’m also pushing my own perspective into the later nineteenth century by editing volume 5 of The Cultural History of Rhetoric for Bloomsbury, covering the nineteenth-century “Age of Empire” from a global, interdisciplinary vantage.