Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature

This book explores the early modern interest in conversation.

Jennifer Richards (Author)

9780521035712, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 14 May 2007

220 pages
22.8 x 16 x 1.3 cm, 0.332 kg

'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

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]