ABSTRACT
A perfectly ordinary reaction to Jane Austen’s novels is to remark that they seem “true,” historically correct. The reaction is in large part due to the manner in which Austen “accounts for” the fictional events she gives an “account of”; the reader senses, for example, the diagnostic power of her descriptions of conversation. The core of the classical rhetorical program had been constituted by the integration of three tasks—docere, delectare, movere: rhetoric as discipline regulated a discourse of instruction, delight, and persuasion. The pragmatic nature of the eighteenth-century program exemplified by Hume’s Enquiries helps explain its practical force; the program both shapes intellectual discipline and invests social behavior. Shaftesbury’s confection of the role of critic is a key event in the transformation of rhetoric into criticism, a criticism that retains an argumentative cognitive strategy, a rhetorical theory of truth, to discipline reception.
