The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England

The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England

Author: Associate Professor of English Michael Ullyot

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-03-03

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 0192849336

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In this study, Michael Ullyot makes two new arguments about the rhetoric of exemplarity in late Elizabethan and Jacobean culture: first, that exemplarity is a recursive cycle driven by rhetoricians' words and readers' actions; and second, that positive moral examples are not replicable, but rather aspirational models of readers' posthumous biographies. For example, Alexander the Great envied Achilles less for his exemplary life than for Homer's account of it. Ullyot defines the three types of decorum on which exemplary rhetoric and imitation rely, and charts their operations through Philip Sidney's poetics, Edmund Spenser's poetry, and the dedications, sermons, elegies, biographies, and other occasional texts about Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, and Henry, Prince of Wales. Ullyot expands the definition of occasional texts to include those that criticize their circumstances to demand better ones, and historicizes moral exemplarity in the contexts of sixteenth-century Protestant memory and humanist pedagogy. The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England concludes that all exemplary subjects suffer from the problem of metonymy, the objection that their chosen excerpts misrepresent their missing parts. This problem also besets historicist literary criticism, ever subject to corrections from the archive, so this study concedes that its own rhetorical methods are exemplary.


Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England

Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England

Author: Jennifer Richards

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-02-12

Total Pages: 431

ISBN-13: 1134172869

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Rhetoric has long been a powerful and pervasive force in political and cultural life, yet in the early modern period, rhetorical training was generally reserved as a masculine privilege. This volume argues, however, that women found a variety of ways to represent their interests persuasively, and that by looking more closely at the importance of rhetoric for early modern women, and their representation within rhetorical culture, we also gain a better understanding of their capacity for political action. Offering a fascinating overview of women and rhetoric in early modern culture, the contributors to this book: examine constructions of female speech in a range of male-authored texts, from Shakespeare to Milton and Marvell trace how women interceded on behalf of clients or family members, proclaimed their spiritual beliefs and sought to influence public opinion explore the most significant forms of female rhetorical self-representation in the period, including supplication, complaint and preaching demonstrate how these forms enabled women from across the social spectrum, from Elizabeth I to the Quaker Dorothy Waugh, to intervene in political life. Drawing upon incisive analysis of a wide range of literary texts including poetry, drama, prose polemics, letters and speeches, Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England presents an important new perspective on the early modern world, forms of rhetoric, and the role of women in the culture and politics of the time.


Unruly Examples

Unruly Examples

Author: Alexander Gelley

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780804724906

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These 2 essays demonstrate that, beyond example's rich genealogy in the rhetorical tradition, it involves issues that are central to current theories of meaning and ethics in literature and philosophy.


Refiguring Revolutions

Refiguring Revolutions

Author: Kevin Sharpe

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 0520339126

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Refiguring Revolutions presents an original and interdisciplinary reassessment of the cultural and political history of England from 1649 to 1789. Bypassing conventional chronologies and traditional notions of disciplinary divides, editors Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker frame a set of new agendas for, and suggest new approaches to, the study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Customary periodization by dynasty and century obscures the aesthetic and cultural histories that were enacted between and even by the English Civil Wars and the French Revolution. The authors of the essays in this volume set about returning aesthetics to the center of the master narrative of politics. They focus on topics and moments that illuminate the connection between aesthetic issues of a private or public nature and political culture. Politics between the Puritan Revolution and the Romantic Revolution, these authors argue, was a set of social and aesthetic practices, a narrative of presentations, exchanges, and performances as much as it was a story of monarchies and ministries. 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 1998.


The Invention of China in Early Modern England

The Invention of China in Early Modern England

Author: Jonathan E. Lux

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-11-01

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 3030840328

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The Invention of China in Early Modern England describes how several different English communities became aware of China. It begins by describing how early modern intellectuals used the utopian ideal of China to license all kinds of progressive innovation before chronicling how England’s growing commerce in southeast Asia radically changed China’s representation in the English discourse community. For the new community of English merchants proposing to trade in Chinese goods, China became the seminal example in the growing discourse community of English Orientalism. It was an absolute or arbitrary authoritarian state, associated with crooked business dealings, and cloaked in a rhetoric of secrecy and exclusion—a dangerous exception to the traditions, values, and identities of the emergent English speaking states. Finally, the book points out some of the ways that contemporary English language sources continue to represent this early modern English thought tradition, labelling the complexities of modern China with analytical vocabulary perhaps better suited to the pressing political anxieties of the seventeenth century.


Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England

Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England

Author: Edith Snook

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1351871498

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A study of the representation of reading in early modern Englishwomen's writing, this book exists at the intersection of textual criticism and cultural history. It looks at depictions of reading in devotional works, maternal advice books, poetry, fiction, and manuscripts for evidence of ways in which women conceived of reading in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Among the texts considered are Katherine Parr, Lamentation of a Sinner; Anne Askew, The Examinations of Anne Askew; Dorothy Leigh, The Mothers Blessing; Elizabeth Grymeston, Miscelanea Meditations Memoratives; Anne Cornwallis's commonplace book (Folger MS V.a.89); Aemelia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum; The Death and Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Bodleian MS Don.e.17), and Mary Wroth, The First Part of The Countess of Montgomery's Urania.


The Political Bible in Early Modern England

The Political Bible in Early Modern England

Author: Kevin Killeen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1107107970

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This book explores the Bible as a political document in seventeenth-century England, revealing how it provided a key language of political debate.


Imagining Early Modern Histories

Imagining Early Modern Histories

Author: Elizabeth Ketner

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-07-15

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1134803974

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Interpreting textual mediations of history in early modernity, this volume adds nuance to our understanding of the contributions fiction and fictionalizing make to the shape and texture of versions of and debates about history during that period. Geographically, the scope of the essays extends beyond Europe and England to include Asia and Africa. Contributors take a number of different approaches to understand the relationship between history, fiction, and broader themes in early modern culture. They analyze the ways fiction writers use historical sources, fictional texts translate ideas about the past into a vernacular accessible to broad audiences, fictional depictions and interpretations shape historical action, and the ways in which nonfictional texts and accounts were given fictional histories of their own, intentionally or not, through transmission and interpretation. By combining the already contested idea of fiction with performance, action, and ideas/ideology, this collection provides a more thorough consideration of fictional histories in the early modern period. It also covers more than two centuries of primary material, providing a longer perspective on the changing and complex role of history in forming early modern national, gendered, and cultural identities.


Women Writing History in Early Modern England

Women Writing History in Early Modern England

Author: Megan Matchinske

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-05-14

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0521508673

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This title investigates and documents fascinating accounts written by 17th-century Englishwomen, which explore the shifting relationships between past and future.