Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature

Erscheinungsjahr 2007
ISBN: 978-0-521-03571-2
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 218 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 365 g

Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature explores the early modern interest in conversation as a newly identified art. Conversation was widely accepted to have been inspired by the republican philosopher Cicero. Recognizing his influence on courtesy literature - the main source for 'civil conversation' - Jennifer Richards uncovers alternative ways of thinking about humanism as a project of linguistic and social reform. She argues that humanists explored styles of conversation to reform the manner of association between male associates; teachers and students, buyers and sellers, and settlers and colonial others. They reconsidered the meaning of 'honesty' in social interchange in an attempt to represent the tension between self-interest and social duty. Richards explores the interest in civil conversation among mid-Tudor humanists, John Cheke, Thomas Smith and Roger Ascham, as well as their self-styled successors, Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Richards, Jennifer

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Types of honesty: civil and domestical conversation; 2. From rhetoric to conversation: reading for Cicero in The Book of the Courtier; 3. Honest rivalries: Tudor humanism and linguistic and social reform; 4. Honest speakers: sociable commerce and civil conversation; 5. A commonwealth of letters: Harvey and Spenser in dialogue; 6. A new poet, a new social economy: homosociality and The Shepheardes Calender; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Über Autor(innen)

Richards, Jennifer
Jennifer Richards is Lecturer in English at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. She is the editor, with James Knowles, of Shakespeare's Late Plays: New Readings (1999) and the author of articles in Renaissance Quarterly and Criticism.