Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature
Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature
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
'… valuable approaches … thought-provoking and nicely controversial study.' Notes and Queries
'… well paced and well proportioned … carefully argued and interesting.' Sixteenth Century Journal
'Jennifer Richards' Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature is itself a fine example of cultural history focused on early modern rhetorical concerns. Rhetorica
'… thought-provoking and nicely controversial'. Thomas MacFaul, Oriel College, Oxford
'The argument of Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature is an elegant if complex one. …[this book] is a discriminating and careful work of literary and cultural history.' Criticism
Product details
May 2007Paperback
9780521035712
220 pages
228 × 160 × 13 mm
0.332kg
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.
