This chapter examines Plato’s critique of sophistry and rhetoric as pseudo-technai. It argues that Plato targets these rival intellectual traditions by exposing their lack of specialization and rationality – two essential features of genuine technai. Through analyses of the Gorgias, Protagoras, Hippias Minor, and Euthydemus, the chapter shows how figures like Gorgias, Protagoras, Hippias, Euthydemus, and Dionysodorus fail to meet the standards of professional expertise. They either claim mastery over too many fields or rely on superficial persuasion rather than causal reasoning. Plato’s rhetorical strategy is to portray these figures as quacks – imposters who mimic the appearance of wisdom without its substance. By contrast, philosophy is positioned as the true technē of virtue, requiring lifelong training and intellectual rigor.

The Chronographia is an original, experimental, and uneven work, an imaginative exercise in interpreting the past through a rhetorical performance that expands into scenes to intensify and frame events. The skills of the rhetor are summarized. The text’s interplay of voices and roles, especially the imperial role, will be examined, together with the range of emotions felt and modelled, the spaces highlighted, the structuring of scenes, and their audiences inside and outside the action. Each reign dictates its own directions, each is assessed by its embodiment in the emperor: the Body Politic being the tacit underlying metaphor in a text unusually rich in metaphor. The aim is to discover how Psellos experiments with the material and finds out its possibilities; how the work develops to accommodate the increasing pressures of his own presence and self-presentation; how the empathetic, volatile, sensibility described by Papaioannou in Psellos’ rhetoric functions in the genre of history, and, from Book Six, how the Platonic idea of indirect rule by a philosopher (Kaldellis) fares, given the interfusion of the tragic and the comic in its course.

The Macedonian dynasty, wonderfully rooted in murder, having been renewed by violence as a peaceful, orderly, administration, a soldier-emperor is installed: Constantine IX, the main subject of the Chronographia, and its potential stumbling block. To deal with his own self-division towards Constantine, Psellos creates an elaborate structure of genres and disciplines – panegyric and history, rhetoric and philosophy – and conflicting roles for himself, to dramatize an odi et amo in which the comic and the tragic infuse each other in continuously changing ways. The effect is exhilating, shocking, and ingeniously balanced, as Psellos sets the failure of an indirect rule by a philosopher (Kaldellis) and his own moral degeneration against the expansive power of panegyric vested in this emperor. For good artistic reasons, Psellos omits the patriarch Keroularios and his attack on Psellos’ orthodoxy, projecting his own displacement onto a highly fictional portrayal of another character. The reign of Theodora, however, is vitiated by his repressed anger with Keroularios, ranting against his proxies in her government. The two reigns exemplify the work’s uneven quality.

This chapter shows how Percy Shelley moves from taking negative positions on others’ beliefs to exploring how to hold and encourage hopeful beliefs without absolutes. The first section examines Shelley’s developing argument, in his philosophical prose, for the value of the malleable mindset he calls “persuasion” within the framework of necessity. The abiding appeal of rigid convictions, and of literary genres that might impose them, comes to the fore in his “Satire upon Satire” and Julian and Maddalo. The chapter then shows how, in Prometheus Unbound, Shelley reimagines persuasion as a matter chiefly of craft: of rearranging what we think we know or leaving it open-ended. Shelley’s main graphic, rhythmical, and rhetorical instrument for this, it is argued, is the ellipsis, serial dots that perform the same disruptive function as the vacancies that he describes in his prose as the most important sites of cognitive and collective reform.

The Coda takes stock of the book’s argument for the distinctiveness of persuasion among its lexical and cognitive others in Romantic writing. It responds to some common misconceptions about the malleability of persuasion and considers its implications for our lives among others today, in political and professional community. The chapter suggests that one response to our civic polarizations, as well as to professional anxieties about the methods and future of literary studies, might well be the self-conscious and flexible mode of persuasion countenanced by Romantic writers at a moment of comparable entrenchments and attacks on the value of a creative and critical imagination. Rather than assume synonymy between persuasion and conviction, in other words, and dismiss them both as either so much domineering or else so much boundless subjectivism, we might consider the continuing value of the kind of judgment under uncertainty characteristic of persuasion as it was reimagined in Romantic writing.

The chapter-length Introduction establishes the historical and philosophical contexts for the Romantic reimagining of persuasion. A section on David Hume’s skeptical views on “perswasion” and the influential response to them by the Scottish rhetorician and minister George Campbell draws important terminological distinctions and delineates key features of the inquiries and reimaginings addressed in the chapters that follow. The main features of the concept of malleable persuasion are described and differentiated from adjacent concepts in works by Lord Byron, Edmund Burke, and Mary Shelley, among others. The book is situated in relation to major lines of scholarship on Romantic cultures of controversy, secular casuistry, and the histories of belief and skepticism. The chapter ends by addressing the distinctly literary dimensions of persuasion, including the role of reading in its representation and elicitation, and the formal resources involved across genres.

Chapter 1 delineates the overlapping new paradigms of persuasion elaborated by Thomas De Quincey and William Hazlitt in response to George Campbell and David Hume, and considers their implications for the genre of the periodical essay. Against Campbell’s definition of persuasion as an emotional supplement to rational conviction, De Quincey and Hazlitt, in their essays of the 1820s and 1830s, formulate the alternative of a self-consciously partial and flexible way of holding and forming beliefs. De Quincey’s performance of such persuasion in “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” makes apparent the problem of anything-goes judgment that leads him, in his “Rhetoric” and “Style” essays, to restrict persuasion to “subjective” domains like rhetoric and poetry. Hazlitt, by contrast, in his late-career essays on belief, opinion, and controversy, endorses malleable persuasion in all domains of dispute and theorizes its unique affinity with imaginative literature.

Chapter 1 argues that two major changes in the long eighteenth century brought questions about literary sensorimotor imagery to the fore: first, the blending of classical models of rhetoric with modern philosophical theories about how the mind moves; and second, the proliferation of reproducible printed illustrations. In the first case, because the passions were explained by the flow of humours and animal spirits or the vibration of nerves, emotion was motion in essays on criticism. Dennis, Kames, and Johnson promoted sensorimotor models of reading and writing that, even as pamphlets and periodicals increasingly satirized mind-in-motion models, continued to wield enormous explanatory power in theories about human agency and creativity. In the second case, serpentine line illustrations in works by Cavendish, Hogarth, and Sterne demonstrate how printed images were not only visual cues but also embodied proprioceptive prompts inviting readers to imagine their bodies in motion.

This chapter looks at Thomas Moore’s attempts to maintain a midway point between post-Napoleonic conservatism and emerging radical reform movements. It looks at his biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan in the context of wider debates about the nature of Whiggism and its suitability to the political moment. Moore’s attempts at moderation ran aground on the shores of Irish history, as his work increasingly moved to prose in order to make explicit political tensions that had been implicit in his poetry.

This chapter recovers the work of Charles Phillips, a barrister known for his florid rhetorical style. It looks at his argument with the Edinburgh Review about the proper nature of ‘legitimate eloquence’ within the context of wider tensions in post-Napoleonic Britain around the democratisation of public speech. Oratory was now considered potentially radical, even anarchic, which gave a greater urgency to defining and policing Irish speech.

This conclusion looks at cultural debate in the 1830s to consider the way in which the earlier decades of the nineteenth century were already being historicised by writers and intellectuals aware that they were entering a new literary age.

This chapter looks at Maria Edgeworth’s writings on Edmund Burke from 1805 to 1814, culminating in her novel Patronage published in that year. It looks at the reputation of Burke and the charges against his style by the Irish writer George Ensor as a way of thinking about how Burke’s mixed style of rhetoric may have influenced Edgeworth’s fictional practice. The relationship between rhetoric and realism is considered, as well as reasons for Edgeworth’s fall from literary favour in later years.

This chapter looks at the work of John and Michael Banim, who emerged as important Catholic novelists in the late 1820s. Their work attempted to capture the energy of O’Connellite politics in fiction, blending rhetorical set pieces with melodramatic incident. Public speech and oratory become centrally important to their work, and the influence of Richard Lalor Shiel on John Banim in particular becomes clear on reading his work.

This chapter looks at a minor controversy in the life of Charles Robert Maturin to consider his work in the light of sectarian tensions during the ‘Second Reformation’: the energised push by the Church of Ireland to convert the Catholic population in the 1820s. The role eloquence plays in Maturin’s work will be looked at and considered in relation to wider issues surrounding religious rhetoric and Gothic writing.

This introduction provides an introduction to the historical and theoretical frameworks for looking at Irish literature in the Romantic period. It considers the place of the Irish language in characterising Irish eloquence, and argues that British critics also linked Irish eloquence to Gothic excess. It introduces some of the main authors that will be looked at in greater depth later, including Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Thomas Moore, and Charles Maturin.

This chapter looks at the work of Sydney Owenson, focusing on two novels, The Wild Irish Girl and Woman; or Ida of Athens. It considers the way in which Owenson crafted a powerful model of female eloquence in response to the perceived failures of more mainstream political speech. It looks at the legacy of the Volunteer movement of the 1780s as well as the Irish-language background of her work. It also notes the publication of Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia, an important rhetorical treatise, and the links between his work and Owenson.

After revisiting the main arguments and evidence presented in the book, the epilogue offers avenues for future research and returns to the collective mechanisms that fostered tolerance for peithō’s ambiguity and coerciveness in ancient Greece. To demonstrate the potential applicability of this study to other contexts, the epilogue surveys texts from fields outside Classics that express similar concerns about the paradoxes of persuasion in society today. It concludes by contrasting the psychosocial preparedness of ancient Greek communities with the experiences of modern-day jurors subjected to prolonged coercive persuasion during a trial.

Phillis Wheatley Peters’s America was both a place and an idea, a reality and an aspiration. Through her writings she transformed herself from being a victim in the actual America into a voice for the America she envisioned. Wheatley Peters’ works should be considered diachronically, recognizing the significance of when she wrote what and to whom, rather than synchronically, as if her positions were unchanging over time. Anyone who attempts to identify her political beliefs must consider how free she was to express them, as well as whether the voice we hear is that of the author, rather than that of a persona she has created. Her image of America evolved radically during the 1770s, as did her vision of her place and role in it. The many ways in which Wheatley Peters subtly and indirectly confronted the issues of racism, sexism, and slavery are increasingly appreciated. Her ambition to be recognized as America’s unofficial poet laureate should be undisputed. Considered a remarkable curiosity during her lifetime, Wheatley Peters is now recognized as a major historical, literary, and political figure, whose significance transcends her ethnic, gender, and national identities.