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
June 2003Hardback
9780521824705
220 pages
237 × 159 × 20 mm
0.5kg
Available
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.
