"Con/Texts of Persuasion is a path-breaking multidisciplinary body of essays devoted to exploring how discourse--literary, but also political, religious, commercial and philosophical--draws on strategies from linguistics, pragmatics, argumentation theory, rhetoric and hermeneutics, not merely to communicate, but to induce recipients to think or to act differently than they might have otherwise. Persuasion is context- and culture-bound, a dialogue-friendly rhetoric in the hermeneutics of understanding (Gadamer) whose negation, manipulation, can serve the ends of propaganda ("Bend Sinister"); but it is also a vehicle for circumventing censure (burlesque) or for providing oratory with intertextual resonance ("I have a dream"). An appeal to emotions, values and subjectivity, persuasion can "immerse" the reader in a fictional world or it can result from the "phonosemantic" strategies of poetry and advertising. And the ways of persuasion can extend to the situatedness of interpretive context in critical discourse in its ideologically consonant vs. dissonant modes. An invaluable collection for anyone with an interest in the persuasive powers of textual communication."--p. [4] of cover.