...Scholarship has, Mulvihill argues, sketched the multiplicity of "publics" in the period but left in place a fundamental interpretive split between radical reform rhetoric and reactionary rhetoric, and between faith in public discourse on the one hand and deep distrust of it on the other. Arguing that this binary misses a fundamental feature of civic discourse in the period, Mulvihill "proposes to cut across the left/right poles characterizing discussions of Romantic England by examining the complicated (and sobering) encroachments of the regressive onto the progressive in rhetoric of all political stripes" (19). Because similar fundamental assumptions about rhetoric informed public discourse across the political spectrum, Mulvihill claims, a regressive skepticism characterized a wide range of public rhetoric, a phenomenon he traces to "the assimilation of empirical philosophy in late eighteenth-century rhetorical theories by which truth validity was reduced to the mere sensation of truth" (20). Reading...

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