How Words Make Things Happen (2019)
In How Words Make Things Happen, David Bromwich, a leading literary critic and political commentatorm, explores how words can turn into action. The author offers an enhanced understanding of the effects of language, both intended and inadvertent, and gives interpretations of persuasive and imaginative writing across the genres of philosophy, political oratory, drama, prose fiction, and lyric poetry. Bromwich delves into the words of various speakers and writers, including J.L. Austin, Aristotle, Cicero, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Henry James, Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, Walter Bagehot, W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, George Orwell, Salman Rushdie, John Stuart Mill, and Mario Savio.