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The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R2,809
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The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (Hardcover, New)
Series: Rhetoric and Society
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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This engaging and insightful book explores the fate of eloquence in
a period during which it both denoted a living oratorical art and
served as a major factor in political thought. Seeing Hume's
philosophy as a key to the literature of the mid-eighteenth
century, Adam Potkay compares the staus of eloquence in Hume's
Essays and Natural History of Religion to its status in novels by
Sterne, poems by Pope and Gray, and Macpherson's Poems of Ossian.
Potkay explains the sense of urgency that the concept of eloquence
evoked among eighteenth-century British readers, for whom it
recalled Demosthenes exhorting Athenian citizens to oppose tyranny.
Revived by Hume and many other writers, the concept of eloquence
resonated deeply for an audience who perceived its own political
community as being in danger of disintegration. Potkay also shows
how, beginning in the realm of literature, the fashion of polite
style began to eclipse that of political eloquence. An ethos
suitable both to the family circle and to a public sphere that
included women, "politeness" entailed a sublimation of passions, a
"feminine modesty as opposed to "masculine" display, and a style
that sought rather to placate or stabilize than to influence the
course of events. For Potkay, the tension between the ideals of
ancient eloquence and of modern politeness defined literary and
political discourses alike between 1726 and 1770: although
politeness eventually gained ascendancy, eloquence was never
silenced.
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