SOURCE: Bales, Richard. “Strategies of Persuasion in Fromentin's Dominique.” Essays in French Literature, no. 25 (November 1988): 37-52.

In the following essay, Bales suggests that Fromentin used sophisticated methods of persuasion in Dominique to influence his readers.

In an article of 1928, Marcel Cressot described Fromentin's Dominique (1862) as presenting “le procès du romantisme”.¹ Thirty years later, Ronald Grimsley was to assert that the novel contains “the final expression of a Romanticism which has overcome itself only to ensure its permanent survival in a more remote and hermetic form”.² And Graham Dunstan Martin, in a persuasive article of 1982, argues that, if Dominique does indeed represent an assault on Romanticism, then this is “to say the least highly ambiguous, and […] a very different moral emerges from the book”.³ He concludes thus:

If we suppose […], as do the majority of critics, that Dominique is consciously intended as an attack on romanticism, then it...