Rhetorical Action Research Articles

Fictionality as a Rhetorical Resource for Dual Narrative Progression

Fictionality as a Rhetorical Resource for Dual Narrative Progression Dan Shen (bio) Fictionality may be viewed from different perspectives, each giving the most weight to one of the three entities involved in communication: the addresser, the message, and the addressee. Most previous approaches endeavor to reveal the fictional nature of the message, but some pragmatic investigations [End Page 495] try to show the determining force of the addressee and the context: whether a text is put on a shelf with the classifying label of “fiction” or on a shelf with the label of “nonfiction” and whether a reader reads the text as fiction or as nonfiction would give rise to drastically different interpretations in terms of the text’s fictionality (see, for instance, Kearns 2–14)1. What has been more or less neglected is the remaining entity: the addresser, who can be viewed either as a producer of fictionality as a product or as a user of fictionality as a helpful resource in communicating with the addressee. As pointed out by Walsh, most previous approaches to fictionality rely on a product-oriented understanding of fictionality based on its relation to truth that makes it radically different from nonfictionality and its relation to truth. If the addresser is brought into consideration, she or he will be viewed only as a creator of the product as fiction. By contrast, Walsh’s rhetorical approach, which shifts attention to the communicative process, views fictionality as a rhetorical resource, one that is utilized by the addresser in trying to affect the addressee. Walsh thinks that his rhetorical position is not shared by the widely adopted rhetorical approach as led first by Wayne Booth and then by James Phelan, and he refers to the classic narrative communication model proposed by Seymour Chatman in distinguishing the two rhetorical approaches (see the section “Rhetorical Accounts” in the target essay). But in effect Chatman’s model is based on a misunderstanding of the concept of the “implied author” put forward by Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction at the height of formalist criticism excluding the consideration of the author. In order to talk about the author as a prerequisite for rhetorical criticism, Booth used the metaphor of real author’s “creating” the implied author to make the latter appear textual. As I made clear in “What is the Implied Author?” (see also Shen “Booth’s,” “Implied”), if we examine Booth’s formulations carefully, we’ll find that Booth’s distinction between the implied author and the real author is no other than one between the author in the process of writing a text and the author in daily life—the implied author is the very writer of the text. Unfortunately, Booth’s “creating” metaphor formed an almost unavoidable pitfall for narrative theorists including Chatman, who confined the communication among “Implied author → Narrator → Narratee → Implied reader” to the text (Shen, “What” 88–89). To me, so long as rhetorical critics including Booth himself and Phelan in recent years are concerned with how the writer communicates with his intended audience and how individual readers react [End Page 496] differently to the communicative invitation, there is no essential difference between the Walsh and the Booth–Phelan rhetorical approaches, since both are concerned with how addressers utilize rhetorical resources to affect addressees. Phelan’s Somebody Telling Somebody Else, for instance, proposes a paradigm shift from viewing narrative as a structure to viewing it as a rhetorical action in which a teller deploys resources of storytelling for particular purposes in relation to particular audiences, a position in my view essentially compatible to that of Walsh. What is more, the Booth–Phelan line can help flesh out the “implicatures” generated by an understanding of fictionality as discourse designed to move away from direct informative relevance: in addition to cognitive effects as emphasized by Walsh, it highlights affect and ethics. It may be noted that the Booth–Phelan rhetorical line puts more emphasis on various narrative techniques as rhetorical resources such as point of view/focalization and narratorial unreliability. If attention is paid to fictionality, it is treated as one of many rhetorical resources (see Phelan, “Local Nonfictionality” and “Local Fictionality”). By contrast, Walsh, concerned...

The role of white supremacy amongst opponents and proponents of mass schooling in the South during the Common School era

ABSTRACTAlthough common schooling began to take off in the northern United States around the 1830s, it did not gain great momentum in the South until the postbellum period. Spanning this lengthy Common School era, this article explores the role white supremacy played in both the development and the impediment of schooling for the masses in the southern United States. Through analysis of archival and other primary and secondary data sources, the ways in which white supremacist ideology and actions shape-shifted throughout this time in history are mapped and expounded upon. This includes the rhetorical strategies and actions carried out by southern school reformers and opponents within their speeches, editorials, sermons, and addresses to maintain or amplify white power. Prominent Common School figures who held residency within the former Confederate States of America such as William Henry Ruffner and J.L.M. Curry, as well as lesser-known educational advocates and opponents of education are highlighted. This article begins with some of the arguments that were made both for and against education of slaves, for or against common schooling of white children, and proceeds into many of the large-scale schooling efforts of the postbellum period, all analyzed through the lens of white supremacy.

Mobility, Moms, and the Babywearing Phenomenon

This article extends scholarly inquiry into the rhetorical resonances of motherhood by examining how “motherhood” is constituted through spatial, temporal, and material relations, which themselves are inextricable from mothers’ differential mobilities. Mothers’ access to transportation, ease of movement through public spaces, and physical proximity to their children all contribute to both public and private understandings of what “good mothering” entails. Drawing on geographer Timothy Cresswell’s notion of “mobility constellations” to describe the cultures surrounding different mobility practices, the article teases out the differential affordances of two such constellations: babywearing and stroller pushing. In addition to demonstrating how these two contemporary mobility practices constitute motherhood differently, the article calls for rhetoric and communication scholars to examine “rhetorics of mobility” as a means to account more fully for the range of rhetorics that influence how identities are shaped, privilege is maintained, and rhetorical action can lead to social transformation.

Building genre knowledge in second language writers during study abroad in higher education

Few studies have examined how second language (L2) students build new genre knowledge in the process of participating in L2 rhetorical situations during study abroad. The current study examines how L2 students utilize their prior genre knowledge and construct new L2 genre knowledge during study abroad. This study adopted the Rhetorical Genre Studies perspective, which argues that recurrent social situations influence people in carrying out rhetorical actions. The participants were four South Korean students enrolled in a US university as exchange students. Data included twelve semi-structured individual interview transcripts and participants' assignments written during study abroad. Findings indicated that during study abroad, participants utilized their prior process genre knowledge and discipline-specific content genre knowledge acquired at their home universities for completing L2 writing assignments. Participants’ comments also pointed to the building of new L2 genre knowledge by being exposed to new yet somewhat familiar rhetorical situations and producing various academic genres, such as research reports, in the L2 during study abroad. This study highlights that L2 study abroad students should be considered as boundary crossers across languages and across writing tasks, that is, students who actively repurpose prior genre knowledge and build new genre knowledge in negotiating L2 rhetorical situations.

Produção escrita para (da) academia em contexto universitário pós-Bolonha: uma reflexão crítica

Este artigo visa descrever a agentividade dos principais protagonistas (discentes e docentes) nas propostas apresentadas pela Declaração de Bolonha, em seu Decreto-Lei 74/2006, de 24 de março, e pelos programas implementados nas Faculdades de Direito das universidades públicas portuguesas. Seguindo pressupostos teóricos do Interacionismo Sociodiscursivo (BRONCKART et al, 2004), de uma Retórica da Ação como apontam Miller (1984) e Bazerman (2006) e contributos descritivos desenvolvidos por Fillmore (1975, 1977), poder-se-á observar que, nos documentos, os agentes principais são representados por papéis sintático-semânticos que não seriam expectáveis nestes textos. Tal constatação pode vir a atestar a existência de uma semiotização diferenciada entre a linguagem sobre o trabalho e a linguagem como trabalho, conceitos desenvolvidos por Nouroudine (2002). Procura-se mostrar, assim, através de determinado viéz descritivo, que o ‘pretenso’ objetivo da própria Declaração de Bolonha, o de estimular uma maior participação do aluno no processo de aprendizagem, de forma a torná-lo mais autónomo e mais facilmente empregável no contexto europeu, pode vir a ser seriamente comprometido.

Modelling for a living: two-level games and rhetorical action in the foreign debt negotiations of post-revolutionary Tunisia

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the global-level financial constraints that shape Tunisia's foreign policy, this debtor state's international agency and the way its post-2011 authorities have managed/negotiated the issue of foreign debt both internally and internationally, including the ‘odious debt’ inherited from the Ben Ali dictatorship and the renewed borrowing necessities of the country. Viewed against the backdrop of the geopolitical and economic vulnerability that has driven Tunisian foreign policy throughout history, foreign debt is shown to have featured as a highly politicised issue in the domestic sphere in 2011–2012, until the February 2013 crisis enabled an increasingly technocratic government to halt the parliamentary bill calling for a debt audit and to break the taboo on new borrowing from the IMF. On the external front, a distinction is drawn between an adaptive/compliant and a resistant type of foreign policy agency, which can be observed in the international action and rhetoric on this matter deployed by Essebsi and Marzouki respectively. Adaptive/compliant foreign policy agency is technocratic and de-politicising in nature, as it attempts to isolate or blackbox domestic politics when negotiating Tunisian foreign debt abroad – while paradoxically exploiting an ideal representation of Tunisia's democratic transition (role modelling) in order to demand greater international financial support. Resistant foreign policy agency is more openly political inasmuch as its builds on post-revolutionary domestic politics and contestation. Although the latter approach bore some material fruit in the form of debt conversion measures by the country's major bilateral creditors, adaptive/compliant foreign policy agency prevailed from 2013 onwards.

Editor’s Note

The bouleutêrion (the council house or assembly hall) was the meeting place of the council of citizens in ancient Greece under democracy. The architecture of bouleutêria has been less studied than has the architecture of theaters and religious monuments. The standard study remains William McDonald’s The Political Meeting Places of the Greeks (Johns Hopkins University Press), published in 1943. The study by Christopher Lyle Johnstone and Richard J. Graff that follows here builds on McDonald’s work but analyzes bouleutêria from a distinctly rhetorical perspective: in “Situating Deliberative Rhetoric in Ancient Greece: The Bouleutêrion as a Venue for Oratorical Performance,” they study bouleutêria from the perspective of places of oratorical performance. Theirs is the first study of oratorical sites in ancient Greece that includes both computer-generated reconstructions of the sites, enabling scholars to evaluate sightlines, and technical acoustical analysis, permitting judgments of what was likely heard from particular locations in a particular bouleutêrion. The increased interest in the material conditions of oratorical performances among rhetoric scholars and the uniqueness of Johnstone and Graff’s approach led to the decision to devote virtually this entire issue to their study. The responses to Johnstone and Graff by two scholars, Peter O’Connell, Classics, University of Georgia and author of The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory (University of Texas Press, 2017), and James Fredel, English, Ohio State University and author of Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens: Persuasive Performance from Solon to Demosthenes (Southern Illinois, 2006) complement Johnstone and Graff’s study.

Debating Rhetorical Poetics: Interventions, Amendments, Extensions

Debating Rhetorical Poetics:Interventions, Amendments, Extensions James Phelan Wow! I now have a new appreciation of John V. Knapp's phrase "target essay." Reading all the responses reminds me of another occasion: my first meeting with the English Department faculty at Ohio State after I was suddenly appointed Acting Chair. (The previous Chair had unexpectedly stepped down.) My colleagues expressed a range of attitudes toward my appointment: support, skepticism, resentment, I am-willing-to-give-you-a-chance-but. … Serious stuff, but there was a certain buzz in the room. I feel a similar buzz here, but I would like to make this occasion more like a party: I want to celebrate and give thanks to the twenty-five narrative theorists who have engaged so thoughtfully and generously with my work. For the purposes of keeping the party from getting too chaotic, I think of my respondents/guests as gathering across three rooms. There are no doors between the rooms—the guests frequently move among them—but my engagement with each is in the room where I feel their (singular they!) presence most forcefully. Room One is the Interventions Chamber. Gathered here are those who, in the spirit of friends who speak difficult truths, want me to see the error of my ways and then take the appropriate steps toward rehabilitation. Room Two is the Space of (Mostly) Friendly Amendments. Gathered here are those who support significant aspects of rhetorical poetics [End Page 153] but propose ways of improving it. Room Three is the Extensions Annex. Gathered here are those who generally endorse rhetorical poetics and then look to build on its current condition, often by taking up phenomena that I do not directly address. I also envision a few colorful posters in our party space: "ARA is a meta-chart." "Texts are almost always ambiguous but rhetorical actions often are not." "Test competing hypotheses." the interventions chamber Hello, Jan Alber, Emma Kafalenos, Gerald Prince, Marco Caracciolo, and Karin Kukkonen. You express a range of concerns, particularly about the epistemological basis of rhetorical poetics: how can I know what I claim to know about authors and audiences? Am I not just taking my own subjective interpretations, sprinkling them with rhetorical foo-foo dust, and asserting that they are accurate accounts of authorial intentions and/or responses of authorial audiences? Jan, I hear you telling me that rhetorical poetics is based on a delusion—and a flawed definition of narrative. "[Phelan] does not only think that he is … entitled to speak for the author and several different readers; his permanent references to alleged authorial intentions and reactions of audiences also create the impression that his interpretations are quasi-objective investigations" (35). These references cover up "the fact" (my emphasis) that I am only presenting my "opinions, intuitions, speculations, or hypotheses" (36). You align yourself with David Herman in viewing "hypothetical intentionalism" as a superior approach to authorial agency because it avoids claims about "subjective intentions" and can "account for the possibility that our conjectures about the intentions of others might be wrong" (36). Thanks, Jan, for the straight talk. It makes me smile, since your objections to my speaking for authors do not seem to apply to your speaking for me.1 "Hello, Pot, you can call me Kettle." But I also have a serious point: let us reject the idea that our common blackness is a critical sin and recognize that, in making interpretive claims, what I do in the target essay (and elsewhere) and what you do in your response (and elsewhere) is standard operating procedure in literary studies. Here is David Herman on Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach: "McEwan's novel reflexively calls attention to how systems of emotion terms and concepts make it possible to understand behaviors as [End Page 154] actions—even as it prompts interpreters to use those systems to make sense of the characters" (130). Here you are on Martin Amis' Time's Arrow: Amis' narrator is "a kind of homunculus" (!) (152). Here I am on "Expenses for the Month": readers infer that "Mary" is the stenographer. We could note differences of scale in the claims (local vs. global) and different degrees/kinds...

‘A giant gutter in outer space’: Investigating pessimism as rhetorical action in True Detective

Abstract Perhaps too quickly dismissed as simply ‘downbeat’ conversational partners, pessimists often face the rhetorical burden of negotiating social contexts dismissive of such an outlook. As the discipline of communication studies aims to investigate different perspectives that are made manifest in the marketplace of ideas, it is noteworthy that heretofore little has been said about the pessimist-as-interlocutor. This article establishes a view of pessimism as rhetorical action by investigating the link between such a philosophical world-view and its embodiment as performative utterance. With this end in mind, it engages with the HBO series True Detective (2014) as an illustrative popular culture media example by which to consider some nuances of this interpersonal phenomenon.

Rhetorical entrapment and the politics of alliance cooperation: explaining divergent outcomes in Japan and South Korea during the Iraq War

This article is about rhetorical framing and its effects on foreign policy outcomes – specifically in intra-alliance relations. It argues that leaders’ attempts to change the framing of existing security concepts alter the context – and cost – of alliance cooperation. In particular, I highlight the mechanism of rhetorical entrapment as the causal link between initial rhetorical action and the changed context of alliance cooperation. While previous studies of rhetorical entrapment have focused on individual-level reputational costs – such as moral shaming or political backlash when hypocrisy is exposed – I focus on the socially constructed nature of political rhetoric and the consequences of language use. That is, I explore why leaders are compelled to choose certain security rhetoric in the first place and how social resonance and audience receptivity can present unintended political constraints and hidden costs. In this way, the findings from this article contribute to two separate bodies of work in the field of International Relations that have yet to be examined closely in tandem: the role of foreign policy rhetoric employed by leaders as part of their political legitimation strategies, and the domestic politics of alliance cooperation. Through comparative case studies of Japan and South Korea prior to and during the early stages of the Iraq War, I demonstrate the role of rhetorical entrapment in explaining the politics of alliance cooperation.

Estratégias Retóricas de Legitimação nos Relatórios da Administração: Respostas ao Movimento Antitabagista

Resumo O movimento antitabagista brasileiro impulsionou o desenvolvimento de peças regulatórias que desafiaram a legitimidade das empresas do setor. As organizações podem adotar ações estratégicas retóricas, visando ganhar, manter ou recuperar legitimidade. Tais ações são evidenciadas em Relatórios da Administração (RA) por se caracterizarem como instrumentos de comunicação social. Desse modo, o presente artigo almeja identificar como a empresa líder do setor tabagista, a Souza Cruz S/A, utilizou os conteúdos dos RAs como instrumento de estratégia retórica de legitimação, no período de 1986 a 2012. O Institucionalismo Organizacional foi utilizado como referencial teórico, e a metodologia para tratamento dos dados foi a análise de conteúdo. Evidenciou-se que a Souza Cruz S/A empreendeu esforços para manter sua legitimidade no período analisado, intensificando o uso de apelos retóricos (ethos, pathos e logos) em defesa dos argumentos: (a) fumar é uma escolha racional adulta; (b) a legislação favorece o comércio ilegal de cigarros; e (c) as atividades da empresa beneficiam a sociedade. Assim, este trabalho destaca os RAs como fonte de análise em estudos organizacionais, evidencia a retórica como possibilidade estratégica e propícia aos gestores reflexões acerca da influência do ambiente nas estratégias organizacionais.

A personal text owned by its public— changing readings of Sarah Raal’s Met die Boere in die Veld

What seems to be a typical feature of Boer women’s personal texts which refer to the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) is the militant rhetoric of protest against the British aggression. Met die Boere in die Veld (“With the Boers in the Veld”) by Sarah Raal is a perfect example of this trend. Yet, her case is unique, because she actually spent a part of the war in the veld, fighting side by side with her brothers, which definitely was not a traditional place for a woman during a military conflict. Her memoirs were published for the first time in the 1930s, reprinted a number of times, and re-issued in 2000 in two language editions— Afrikaans and English (significantly under a new title, The Lady who Fought). An additional introduction was added to both new editions, which suggests a new role of the heroine and a new meaning of her story. This paper discusses how Raal’s original foreword and the new introduction influence the reader’s response to the text. Additionally, attention is drawn to the role of other paratextual elements of the book and the matter of translation. Having taken into account political and gender discourses operating as a context for every reading, the text undergoes re-interpretations. Consequently, the book, once an anti-British Afrikaner nationalist propaganda story, turns into a popular adventure tale about a brave Boer girl, a story about an exceptional woman, a proto-feminist who transgresses the conventional gender roles, or into a universal pacifist protest. In the 2000 edition pacifist and feminist aspects come to the foreground, and this way the old story becomes a suitable read for the modern post-apartheid reader.

Social Policy: From the Death of Welfare State to the State “Nameless”. An historic overview of Social Policies in South and Eastern Countries

Social policies play an important role in social systems organisation and in the definition of Social Work strategy within the public life. Understanding the diverse rationalities that embody State and Governments rhetoric and real action is the main goal of this article, highly centred in Social Policies and their paradoxical procedures in social and personal well being. We argue that in most South and Eastern Countries coexists a different form of governance and of public responses to the social needs which led to a difficulty in understanding actual ideology that defines social policies measures and intends. This analysis can’t be done disentailed of an analysis how the different political forms of State have influenced the features and the goals of social policies understood as a sector of public policy.

Genre Innovation: Evolution, Emergence, or Something Else?

In trying to understand genre innovation and the appearance of what seem to be “new genres” in both new and old media, researchers have relied heavily on the concepts of “evolution” and “emergence,” without theorizing these concepts. These terms are usually associated with science, to analyze biological and physical processes, and both carry entailments worth examining. What work does each model of change do and what work does each keep us from doing? When we adopt the language of evolution or emergence, what do we import to our conceptualization of genres, of large-scale rhetorical action, and of the rhetorical organization of culture? Evolution is anti-essentialist, while emergence allows for the phenomenology of essence; both are terministic screens in Burke’s sense and thus incomplete and partial. There may be no general conceptual model adequate to the variety of cultural phenomena and domains in which genres are of interest, but we can continue to learn by testing our observations of particular examples against these useful concepts. We should be conscious of the assumptions we make about essences and relationships, of how and why we identify something as a genre; we should also be alert to the differences between classification by abstraction and classification by descent.

Choose Your Battles: Agonism and Identity in Narratives of Feminist Fitnesses

In this essay, I examine the question of whether one can ascribe to ideologies of fitness and feminism as a rhetorical problem of identification. Using Burkean notions of consubstantiality to illustrate conflicted identity frameworks within narratives of feminism, femininity, and fitness, I turn to the intertwined ancient Greek roots of athletic and rhetorical instruction through the application of agonism, a term denoting struggle inherent in transformation. I then provide textual examination of three contemporary fitness campaigns aimed at promoting women's participation as illustrative examples of antagonistic, cooperative, and agonistic rhetoric in action to demonstrate the productivity of an agonistic approach to feminist fitness narratives.

The Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion

The Rhetoric of Plato’s <i>Republic</i>: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion

The embodied rhetoric of consumerist activism through the lens of conceptual metaphor theory: An exploratory study and research perspectives

This article provides an analysis of the militant rhetoric used by consumer activist movements through the lens of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT). This theory, developed in the field of cognitive linguistics, highlights the fact that our metaphorical language is not only literal. It also orders our thoughts and actions. We begin by demonstrating the extent to which this theory is useful in developing a detailed understanding of consumer activist movements when compared to other conceptual approaches. Specifically, CMT makes it possible to better identify how actors experience their militant activities. We then conduct a virtual ethnographic study to examine the content of verbal and non-verbal communication produced and published online by activists. Various cases of real consumerist activism are studied through the metaphorical language used by these activists. The results of our observations enable us to identify those aspects of activism that are emphasised to consumers with a view to informing and persuading them. Finally, we discuss the conceptual and methodological perspectives stemming from this research.

Constituting community through food charters: A rhetorical-genre analysis

Communities across Canada are increasingly developing food charters, with at least 22 regional charters published in Ontario alone. As a rhetorical genre, food charters are persuasive actions that articulate not only the kind of food system to which a community aspires, but also the kind of community that it aspires to be. We argue that Ontario’s food charters play an important role in constituting a sense of community identity and values through the rhetorical action of the genre itself. We analyze how this is accomplished through two rhetorical features, the naming of community and the listing of community priorities, showing how these features simultaneously obscure and reveal ideological tensions and logical incongruities within each community’s vision for its food system. Our analysis illustrates how the genre of the food charter both responds to and shapes the diverse, possibly conflicting values that inform food policy and food security initiatives in Ontario, and it offers insight into how the genre itself may inadvertently constrain the action it is intended to perform.

Posters for Peace: Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action

Posters for Peace: Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action

Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years by Jeffrey N. Cox

126 BOOK REVIEWS “we see not only the image of the atopia invoked in an attempt to exert mental control over urban space, but also the fear that unproblematically celebrating the spatial transformations wrought by Britain’s global engage­ ments represents a wrong turn—an improper way of engaging with the in­ ternationalized economic flows incarnated in the modern city” (200—201), Carroll casts the author’s memories as a site of inherently global engage­ ment. By bringing the atopia home, the book challenges the supposition that objects of the imagination cannot be “presumed to exist externally to the mind that contemplates them” by inscribing uninhabitable atopias on those “real” lives that literature invites us to inhabit. Rachel Feder University of Denver Jeffrey N. Cox. Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. 276. $95. With the imagined expedition that introduces this richly contextualized new volume, Jeffrey N. Cox spins the globe and then boldly puts his finger on it. Dreaming of a world-spanning Grand Tour that Lord Byron never took, Cox’s introduction rockets past a dizzying array of early nineteenth century regimes, including those in Egypt, Thailand, and Persia, in a fan­ tasy trajectory powered by the unstoppable Bildung of the privileged poet, that “consummate border-crosser and cultural pirate” (7). That Byron would have traveled further if only he’d had the chance suggests the moti­ vational underpinnings of a work like this one, which reveals a Romantic global imagination shaped but not limited by war. Romanticism is a litera­ ture of border crossings, informed by the wartime raids, sallies and skir­ mishes of the Napoleonic era but also galvanized by detente and the cul­ tural transmission allowed by peacetime travel. Together, escalation and de-escalation resulted in new, and newly transgressive, dramatic genres and literary hybrids. In good company with recent studies by Evan Gottlieb, Susan Manning, and Siobhan Carroll, Cox’s Romanticism in the Shadow of War reconsiders second-generation Romantic literary innova­ tions as not merely reactions against first generation poetry, but as part of a complexly situated historical emergence. Limits, it turns out, whether of technology, inhabitability, or international cooperation, compel their own trespass: they demarcate that which we are challenged to think beyond. With this deft spin, Cox shifts our focus from the “major,” first genera­ tion events of the French Revolution to the later clashes, counter-clashes, SiR, 55 (Spring 2016) BOOK REVIEWS 127 and tensile rapprochements that eased open spaces for such border crossings to occur. Here, 1802’s Peace of Amiens becomes the point of origin for a host of significant changes, as renewed connections with the French lead, for some nineteenth century hopefuls, to a cosmopolitan dream of global citizenry. This optimism is then contested (the creation of the Triple Alli­ ance in 1815), disappointed (the Regency’s inadequacy for reform), and re­ inforced (Napoleon’s abdication in 1814 and final defeat in 1815) in the coming years. In six paired chapters, Romanticism in the Shadow of War dem­ onstrates the emergence and transformation of three hybrid subgenres: the melodrama, the satiric jeremiad, and the Italianate romance. Comparing and contrasting a wide archive of texts, Cox reveals these generic evolu­ tions to be as dynamic and unstable as the period itself. This methodology, which is also the volume’s thoroughgoing achievement, enables a critical re-evaluation ofthe generic underpinnings ofa number ofcentral Roman­ tic texts, which draw surprising connections between, for example, Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven. In so doing, Romanticism in the Shadow of War enacts an imagi­ native trespass of taxonomic limits, taking genre as rhetorical action rather than stable categorization. Cox’s opening two chapters investigate developments in drama and stagecraft during windows ofpeace, and suggest genealogical links between Thomas Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery (1802) and Byron’s Manfred (1817). The Peace ofAmiens, which made possible border crossings between Paris and London after years of isolation, brought with it a new and explicitly border-crossing genre: the Melo-Drame (39). Part tragedy and part comedy, the musical melodrama’s “power,” according to...