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The Performance of Conviction : Plainness and Rhetoric in the Early English Renaissance /
Belief or skepticism, obedience or resistance to authority, theatricality or stoic self-possession-Kenneth J. E. Graham explores these alternatives in the culture of early modern England. Focusing on plainness-a stylistic feature of much Renaissance writing-he surveys texts including Wyatt's an...
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| Formato: | Electrónico eBook |
| Idioma: | Inglés |
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Ithaca, NY :
Cornell University Press,
[2019]
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| Colección: | Rhetoric and Society
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| Temas: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Texto completo Texto completo |
| Sumario: | Belief or skepticism, obedience or resistance to authority, theatricality or stoic self-possession-Kenneth J. E. Graham explores these alternatives in the culture of early modern England. Focusing on plainness-a stylistic feature of much Renaissance writing-he surveys texts including Wyatt's anti-courtly verse, the Puritan Admonition to Parliament, Ascham's Scholemaster, Greville's non-dramatic writings, and works of Shakespearean tragedy, revenge tragedy, and verse satire. Graham shows how plainness functions not only as a literary style, but also as a mode of political and religious rhetoric that reflects powerful historical currents.Plainness is a result of the claim to possess the plain truth-a self-evident, absolute truth. In the absence of rhetorical criteria for truth, however, plainness registers a conviction that is plain to those who share it but opaque to those who don't. The plain truth can denote either the truth proclaimed and enforced by a public authority, whether liberal or conservative, or the truth of private conviction. According to Graham, the pervasive ness of plainness in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is evidence of a failure of consensus. The rhetoric of plainness, he asserts, reveals a profound opposition between the attitude of persuasion, a moderately skeptical and inclusive outlook characteristic of Erasmian humanism, and a stance of conviction, an absolutist and exclusive attitude more typical of Neostoicism and political and moral conservatism. |
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| Descripción Física: | 1 online resource (240 p.) |
| ISBN: | 9781501738616 9783110536171 |
| Acceso: | restricted access |