Persuasion: Oratory and the Novel

Frances Ferguson is the Mabel Greene Myers Distinguished Service Professor of English and the College at the University of Chicago (Emerita as of July 1, 2023). She is the author of Wordsworth: Language as Counter-spirit (Yale University Press, 1977), Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (Routledge, 1992), and Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). She is currently completing a study on the rise of mass education (around 1800). Recent essays center on Bitcoin (published) and on eighteenth-century oratory and the English novel (forthcoming).