The Performance of Conviction : : Plainness and Rhetoric in the Early English Renaissance / / Kenneth J. E. Graham.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Graham, Kenneth J. E.,
• MitwirkendeR: Rebhorn, Wayne A.,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2019]; ©1994
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Series: Rhetoric and Society
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (240 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Foreword -- Preface -- Introduction. Captive to Truth: Rethinking Renaissance Plainness -- 1. Wyatt's Antirhetorical Verse: Privilege and the Performance of Conviction -- 2. Educational Authority and the Plain Truth in the Admonition Controversy and The Scholemaster -- 3. Peace, Order, and Confusion: Fulke Greville and the Inner and Outer Forms of Reform -- 4. The Mysterious Plainness of Anger: The Search for Justice in Satire and Revenge Tragedy -- 5. The Performance of Pride: Desire, Truth, and Power in Coholanus and Timon of Athens -- 6. "Without the form of justice": Plainness and the Performance of Love in King Lear -- Epilogue: A Precious Jewel? -- Index