Rhetorical Form of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus

The Rhetorical Form of Carlyle’sSartor Resartus by Gerry H. Brookes offers a searching reappraisal of Thomas Carlyle’s most enigmatic early masterpiece. Long considered a perplexing hybrid—part satire, part philosophy, part spiritual autobiography—Sartor Resartus has resisted conventional classification. Brookes argues instead that the work is best understood as a persuasive essay, a sustained rhetorical performance that weaves fiction and philosophy into a coherent attempt to move its readers toward belief and action. By tracing Carlyle’s invention of fictional voices such as Teufelsdröckh and the Editor, the study demonstrates how rhetorical strategy, rather than narrative consistency, drives the form of the book.

Engaging both historical context and modern critical theory, Brookes situates Sartor within the periodical culture of the 1830s, showing how its unconventional style drew from magazine satire while pressing toward a new mode of moral exhortation. Through close analysis of the work’s structure, fictional devices, and the interplay of “intuition quickened by experience,” the book clarifies how Carlyle’s Clothes Philosophy—his symbolic vision of the spiritual unity underlying material existence—was crafted not as philosophical system but as rhetorical persuasion. Essential for scholars of Romantic and Victorian literature, this study illuminates how Carlyle reshaped essay, fiction, and prophetic discourse into a singular form that anticipated both modernist experimentation and later cultural criticism.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.