This book tackles the manner in which techniques of persuasion inform the substance of major texts written in the Romantic period. After an introduction which reviews aspects of rhetoric germane to such a study, individual chapters detail the way in which they are deployed. In Chateaubriand's Rene, the eponymous hero gears his narrative in such a way as to assure himself of tactical superiority over his listeners.

Constant's Adolphe clothes himself in superficially dazzling language, while the hero of Balzac's Le Lys dans la vallee adopts a more low-key display of epistolary self-justification. In Nerval's Sylvie, the protagonist engages in a program of poetic self-delusion, a procedure which Fromentin's Dominique carries out to a more emphatic degree of willed assertion. The common thread is that all of these texts contain inscribed within their fabric a desire to project private failure as public success.