Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature

Description

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.

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.

'... 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