Emotive language is now best understood by combining the analytic techniques of classical rhetoric with current linguistic practices. With or without prompting, the 'passions' of Renaissance culture can stir contrary feelings in today's readers, which are enlisted to validate a range of theorised responses. This book will mediate between critics, readers, the author and the original audience, using the 'New Rhetoric' to open fresh perspectives on writers as diverse as Christopher Marlowe, Lucy Hutchinson and Margaret Cavendish.
In The sense of Early Modern writing, Mark Robson pursues the relation between the concept of the ‘early modern’ and modernity, tracing the complex interactions of post-Romantic, philosophical aesthetics and early modern rhetoric and poetics. The book therefore questions the status of what we now think of as literary texts in a period prior to the emergence of literature as a category. In this way, Robson argues for an attention to the classical notion of aisthesis, that is, for the crucial dimension of perception and response in reading and thinking -- and its rhetorical determination -- to be taken into account. Robson’s theoretically-informed approach, drawing in particular on the work of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, fundamentally challenges the idea that critical theory is of little relevance in the reading of early modern texts. The sense of Early Modern writing includes readings of both familiar and unfamiliar texts by Shakespeare, Sidney, Jonson, Hester Pulter and others, and considers topics such as ears, eyes, tongues, hands and voices, in order to ask: How should we read early modern texts? The book will therefore be of interest to all students and researchers in early modern or Renaissance studies, as well as to those thinking through the theories and histories of literature, aesthetics and rhetoric.
This book explores the early modern interest in conversation. Conversation was widely accepted to have been inspired by the philosopher Cicero. Recognising his influence on courtesy literature - the main source for 'civil conversation' - Jennifer Richards uncovers new ways of thinking about humanism as a project of linguistic and social reform.
This guide provides the best practices and reference resources, both print and electronic, that can be used in conducting research on literature of the British Renaissance and Early Modern Period. This volume seeks to address specific research characteristics integral to studying the period, including a more inclusive canon and the predominance of Shakespeare.
Offering new readings of works by Shakespeare, Spenser, and their contemporaries, this study examines the profound impact of the cultural shift in the English aristocracy from feudal warriors to emotionally expressive courtiers or gentlemen on all kinds of men in early modern English literature. Jennifer Vaught traces the gradual emergence of men of feeling during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the blossoming of this literary version of manhood during the eighteenth century.
This is the first comprehensive study of sympathy in the early modern period, providing a deeply researched and interdisciplinary examination of its development in Anglophone literature and culture. It argues that the term sympathy was used to refer to an active and imaginative sharing of affect considerably earlier than previous critical and historical accounts have suggested. Investigating a wide range of texts and genres, including prose fiction, sermons, poetic complaint, drama, political tracts, and scientific treatises, Richard Meek demonstrates the ways in which sympathy in the period is bound up with larger debates about society, religion, and identity. He also reveals the extent to which early modern emotions were not simply humoral or grounded in the body, but rather relational, comparative, and intertextual. This volume will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Renaissance literature and history, the history of emotions, and the history and philosophy of science.
Eleven essays invite us to rethink not only what constitutes an environment but also where the environment ends and selfhood begins. The essays examine the dynamic and varied mediations early modern writers posited between microcosm and macrocosm, ranging from discourses on the ecology of passions to striking examples of distributed cognition.
The book looks at how people, things, and new forms of knowledge created "publics" in early modern Europe, and how publics changed the shape of early modern society. The focus is on what the authors call "making publics" — the active creation of new forms of association that allowed people to connect with others in ways not rooted in family, rank or vocation, but rather founded in voluntary groupings built on the shared interests, tastes, commitments, and desires of individuals. By creating new forms of association, cultural producers and consumers challenged dominant ideas about just who could be a public person, greatly expanded the resources of public life for ordinary people in their own time, and developed ideas and practices that have helped create the political culture of modernity. Coming from a number of disciplines including literary and cultural studies, art history, history of religion, history of science, and musicology, the contributors develop analyses of a range of cases of early modern public-making that together demonstrate the rich inventiveness and formative social power of artistic and intellectual publication in this period.
Pastoral Drama and Healing in Early Modern Italy represents the first full-length study to confront seriously the well-rehearsed analogy of the pastoral poet as healer. Usually associated with the edifying function of the Renaissance pastoral, this analogy, if engaged more profoundly, raises a number of questions that remain unanswered to this day. How does the pastoral heal? How exactly do the inner workings of the text cater to the healing? What socio-cultural conventions make the healing possible? What are the major problems that pastoral poetry as mimesis must overcome to make its healing morally legitimate? In the wake of Derrida's seminal work on the Platonic pharmakon, which has in turn led recent criticism to formulate a much more concrete understanding of the theater/drug analogy, the stringent approach to the therapeutic function of the Renaissance pastoral offered in this work provides a valuable critical tool to unpack the complexity contained within a little-understood cliché.
Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560-1613, shows how rhetorical invention, elocution and ethos combined to create plausible representations by generating intellectual and emotional significances which, meaningful in consensual terms, were 'consensually' true. However, some traveller-writers betrayed an unease with such representation, rooted as it was in a metaphorical epistemology out of kilter with an increasingly empiricist age. This book throws new light onto the episteme shift that ushered in modernity with its distrust of metaphor in particular and rhetoric's 'wordish descriptions' in general. In response to the empirical desiderata of scientific rationalism, traveller-writers textually or physically made their own bodies available as evidence of their encounters with wonder, thus transforming themselves into wonderful objects. The irony is that, far from dispensing with rhetoric, they merely put the accent on its more dramatic arts of gesture and action. The body's evidence could still be doctored, but its illusory truths were better able to satisfy the empirical demand for 'ocular proof'. The author's main purposes here are to complement, and sometimes counter, recent work on early modern travel literature by concentrating on its use of rhetoric to communicate meaning; and to suggest how familiarity with the workings of rhetoric and its communicative and epistemological premises may enhance readings of early modern English literature generally.
