Jane Austen's Discourse with New Rhetoric

Jane Austen's Discourse with New Rhetoric identifies major considerations in Jane Austen's novels with those of eighteenth-century Scottish New Rhetoric. Austen uses fictional examples to argue the development of moral understanding in both sexes by educating them in rhetorical subjects found in Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres and George Campbell's The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Her own stance, closely allied to the empiricist thinking from which Campbell's rhetorical phil...