Inaug.-dis.--Halle. / Vita. "Bibliographie": p. 87-89.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Johns Hopkins university, 1904. / Life. Also available in digital form on the Internet Archive Web site.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Johns Hopkins university, 1904. / Life.

Ce mémoire, Women, Sources, and Rhetoric in George Pettie’s A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure, étudie la collection de romans courts de l’anglais moderne intitulée A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure (1576) et l’identifie comme une collection pour les femmes et comme un précurseur du style euphuistique. Le mémoire est constitué de trois chapitres. Dans le premier chapitre, j’analyse la position des femmes au début de l’Angleterre moderne, alors que A Petite Pallace est dédié aux femmes. Le deuxième chapitre traite des éléments structuraux de chaque histoire comprise dans la collection. Je relève également les modifications faites par l’auteur à des histoires d’origine afin de les adapter à ses lecteurs et afin d’attirer davantage d’attention. Le dernier chapitre porte principalement sur les figures de style utilisées par Pettie pour éblouir ses lecteurs et démontrer toute la richesse de la langue anglaise / This thesis, Women, Sources, and Rhetoric in George Pettie’s A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure, studies the early modern English collection of novellas A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure (1576) and indentifies it as a collection for women and a forerunner of the euphuistic style. The thesis consists of three chapters. In the first chapter I consider women’s position in early modern England, as A Petite Pallace is dedicated to ladies. The second chapter deals with structural elements of each story included in the collection. I also trace modifications made by the author to his source stories in order to adapt them for his readers and to attract more attention. The last chapter focuses on linguistic devices used by Pettie to dazzle his audience and to demonstrate the possibilities of the English language.

The thesis traces the evolving attitudes towards rhetoric in the highly-rhetorised English-language prose of the late sixteenth century by focusing on a term that was itself subject to significant change: 'wit'. To wit's pre-existing denotations of intellectual acumen, capacity for reason and good judgement was added a novel meaning, related to the capacity for producing lively speech. As a term encompassing widely divergent meanings, many Elizabethan and early Stuart works explored 'wit' as a central theme or treated the term as significant to explorations of the human mind, its capacity for rhetoric, and the social and moral dimensions of this relationship. The research centres on how 'wit' is seen and how it corresponds to rhetorical wittiness as produced in practice, and questions the implications of this for understanding the social and moral dimensions of the authorial wit. By focusing on the early vernacular manuals of rhetoric by author such as Thomas Wilson and Roger Ascham, on Lyly's and Greene's euphuist prose, and on Thomas Lodge's and Sir Philip Sidney's prose defences of poetry, the first half of the thesis explores the term's conceptual ambiguity. Potentially both reformative and deceptive, this ambiguity becomes a useful tool for the author looking to construct a profitable persona as a Wit, or a brilliant-yet-unruly master of rhetoric. The second half of the research notes how 'wit' tends to outlive its usefulness as a multivalent term in later writings when these seek to move away from the social commodification of an author's rhetoric. Examining Sidney's theological and political aims in The New Arcadia, Thomas Nashe's carnivalesque questioning of the idea of profit, and Francis Bacon's systematic interpretation of Nature, the research suggests that rhetoric and 'wit' maintain both their significance and their ambiguity into the seventeenth century. A meta-rhetorical signpost, 'wit' comes to reflect through its use and disuse both the issues at hand and the inherent self-reflexivity of any attempt to deal directly with rhetoric.