Pages 19 to 23 have been omitted because of Revision / Elizabethan prose fiction has been virtually ignored for a long time. The question of rhetoric in this fiction is an extremely complex issue, and studies which have examined this aspect are usually stylistic analyses that fragment the works by dissecting isolated passages for stylistic data concerning an author's manipulation of particular schemes and tropes. This approach has often tended to ignore the possibility that larger ideals and attitudes may underlie the use of rhetorical figures (i.e. elocutio) in particular passages. While this dissertation does not attempt to resolve the problems of the relationship between rhetorical training in the grammar schools and Elizabethan fiction, or between the English vernacular rhetorics and Elizabethan fiction, it offers some idea about what these writers thought about rhetoric beyond its status as ornamentation. This thesis tries to discover what these writers thought about the possibilities of rhetorical training --that is, about its moral status as an art of persuasion. In my view, the major writers of Elizabethan prose fiction dramatize the abuses of verbal skills; they explore some of the techniques of deception, distortion and manipulation that are afforded by rhetorical training. The subject-matter of this fiction is largely concerned with verbal methods of persuasion that manipulate and distort, that rely on false logic and dishonesty; these writers are concerned with rhetorical attempts to change the face of the "real" world in order to justify a particular idea, action, or belief. My thesis explicates the prose fictional works of Gascoigne, Lyly, Sidney, Nashe and Deloney with this theory in mind. As well as suggesting the ways in which rhetoric is handled as a subject in a variety of fictional contexts, my thesis also explicates the rhetorical strategies which these authors themselves use to involve their reader in evaluating rhetoric. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/15656 |
| Date | 09 1900 |
| Creators | Stephanson, Raymond Alexander |
| Contributors | Blewett, David L., English |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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