Rhetorical Traditions and British Romantic Literature

So successful were the appeals to "genius" by the romantic poets that few critics since have paid much attention to the influence of rhetorical traditions on romantic expression. As the essays in this collection demonstrate, though the status of classical rhetoric declined during the nineteenth century, romantic genius did not sweep away rhetoric. Romantic writers drew upon a number of rhetorical traditions - sophistic, classical, biblical, and enlightenment - in the creation of their art, and interest in various aspects of the art of discourse remained strong. These essays - half of them commissioned for this volume - document the importance of these traditions in shaping the poetry, novels, and criticism of Coleridge, De Quincey, Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake, Austen, and Scott.