Rhetoric and the Familiar in Francis Bacon and John Donne - Softcover

Derrin, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1611478081 ISBN 13: 9781611478082

Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Rhetoric and the Familiar examines the writing and oratory of Francis Bacon and John Donne from the perspective of the faculty psychology they both inherited. Both writers inherited the resources of the classical rhetorical tradition through their university education. The book traces, from within that tradition, the sources of Bacon and Donne's ideas about the processes of mental image making, reasoning, and passionate feeling. It analyzes how knowledge about those mental processes underlies the rhetorical planning of texts by Bacon, such as New Atlantis, Essayes or Counsels, Novum Organum, and the parliamentary speeches, and of texts by Donne such as the Verse Letters, Essayes in Divinity, Holy Sonnets, and the sermons. The book argues that their rhetorical practices reflect a common appropriation of ideas about mental process from faculty psychology, and that they deploy it in divergent ways depending on their rhetorical contexts. It demonstrates the vital importance, in early modern thinking about rhetoric, of considering what familiar remembered material will occur to a given audience, how that differs according to context, and the problems the familiar entails.

About this title

Review:

This is an ambitious and wide-randing first book. In it, Daniel Derrin examines the rhetorical practices of Francis Bacon and John Donne. ... Any student of Bacon, Donne, or Renaissance rhetoric could turn to this book with profit.--Renaissance Quarterly

About the Author:

Daniel Derrin holds a Ph.D in English literature and teaches literature and media communication courses at Macquarie University, Sydney.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1611478081
• ISBN 13: 9781611478082
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 210