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Yasmin Solomonescu will discussing 'Reimagining Persuasion in British Romantic Literature.' She will be joined in conversation by Mark Canuel. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. At the Co-op
About the book: 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.
About the author: Yasmin Solomonescu is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on British Romantic-era literature and questions of belief, rhetoric, cognition, pluralism, and political reform. She the author of a previous monograph, 'John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination' (2014), and is in addition 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. She is currently writing a book about the the poetics of perspective in the nineteenth-century age of empire, and editing volume 5 (1800-1900) of a six-volume Cultural History of Rhetoric for Bloomsbury. With Brian McGrath, she co-edits the Romantic Circles Praxis series of peer-reviewed critical volumes.
About the interlocutor: Mark Canuel is Professor of English at University of Illinois Chicago. His research and teaching interests focus primarily on the areas of British Romanticism, Critical Theory, Political Theory, and Aesthetics. His work explores the connections between political and literary forms, particularly as they emerged in response to the pressures of revolution, reform, and religious dissent between the 1770s and the 1820s. He is author of three monographs: 'Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790-1830' (Cambridge, 2002); 'The Shadow of Death: Romanticism, Literature, and the Subject of Punishment' (Princeton, 2007); 'Justice, Dissent, and the Sublime' (Johns Hopkins, 2012); and T'he Fate of Progress in British Romanticism' (Oxford, 2022). He is also editor of 'British Romanticism: Criticism and Debates' (Routledge, 2015), a collection of new and previously published critical essays on Romanticism; and editor of a Romantic Circles Praxis volume on Romantic Systems (2016). He is currently at work on a new book on the formal contours of Jacobin fiction. His numerous essays and reviews have appeared in journals including ELH, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Representations, Studies in Romanticism, and The Wordsworth Circle.
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