Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560-1613
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A01=Jonathan P.A. Sell
Admirabile Genus
Affective Rhetoric
Author_Jonathan P.A. Sell
Bewtiful Empyre
Blue Swans
Captatio Benevolentiae
Category=DSB
Category=WTL
consensual truth
Contextual Disparity
early modern literature
early modern travel writing
Early Modern Traveller Writers
Edward Webbe
emotional significance
empirical rationalism
Epideictic Oratory
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_travel
Experiential Gestalt
Formula Ab
gesture and action in narrative
Golden Hind
intellectual significance
Introductory Matter
Locus Amoenus
Marvelous Possessions
metaphorical epistemology
Mimetic Fallacy
Modesty Topos
ocular proof evidence
Ralegh
rhetorical invention
rhetorical strategies in early modern texts
Sir Walter Ralegh
St Paul's Churchyard
St Paul’s Churchyard
Travel Writing
traveller-writers analysis
Wider Issue
Wild Man
Product details
- ISBN 9780754656258
- Weight: 484g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 Jul 2006
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560-1613, shows how rhetorical invention, elocution and ethos combined to create plausible representations by generating intellectual and emotional significances which, meaningful in consensual terms, were 'consensually' true. However, some traveller-writers betrayed an unease with such representation, rooted as it was in a metaphorical epistemology out of kilter with an increasingly empiricist age. This book throws new light onto the episteme shift that ushered in modernity with its distrust of metaphor in particular and rhetoric's 'wordish descriptions' in general. In response to the empirical desiderata of scientific rationalism, traveller-writers textually or physically made their own bodies available as evidence of their encounters with wonder, thus transforming themselves into wonderful objects. The irony is that, far from dispensing with rhetoric, they merely put the accent on its more dramatic arts of gesture and action. The body's evidence could still be doctored, but its illusory truths were better able to satisfy the empirical demand for 'ocular proof'. The author's main purposes here are to complement, and sometimes counter, recent work on early modern travel literature by concentrating on its use of rhetoric to communicate meaning; and to suggest how familiarity with the workings of rhetoric and its communicative and epistemological premises may enhance readings of early modern English literature generally.
Jonathan P.A. Sell lectures at the University of Alcalá, Spain.
