Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature
Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature
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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.
- A fascinating study of changing attitudes to male friendship
- This book offers a cultural study of 'honesty' in the early modern period
- Will be of interest to literary and cultural historians
Reviews & endorsements
"well paced and well proportioned: the chapters advance clear arguments in their own rights, but together they also form a persuasive thesis that should help readers reconsider their ideas about sixteenth-century English conduct and courtesy writings...carefully argued and interesting." Sixteenth Century Journal Thomas G. Olsen, State University of New York at New Paltz
Product details
December 2004Adobe eBook Reader
9780511056000
0 pages
0kg
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- 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.
