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This book investigates the role of exemplarity as a rhetorical device in late Elizabethan and Jacobean literature and culture. Ullyot argues that exemplarity is driven by both reader and author, and that positive moral examples were presented as aspirational models in posthumous biography.
List of contents
- Introduction: Historicizing Exemplarity
- 1: Virtuous Action
- 2: Indecorous Spenser
- 3: The Exemplary Cycle
- 4: The Reluctant Genre
- 5: The Problem of Metonymy
- 6: Exemplary Criticism
- Appendix: Verses for the Death of Prince Henry
About the author
Michael Ullyot is Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary. His research includes articles, chapters on late Elizabethan and early Stuart culture, as well as edited primary texts. He has published (with Rebecca W. Bushnell) on Shakespeare and virtual reality; (with Adam J. Bradley) on algorithms for detecting rhetorical figures; on a quantitative model of the English-language sonnet; and on archives and artificial intelligence.
Summary
In this study, Michael Ullyot makes two new arguments about the rhetoric of exemplarity in late Elizabethan and Jacobean culture: first, that exemplarity is a recursive cycle driven by rhetoricians' words and readers' actions; and second, that positive moral examples are not replicable, but rather aspirational models of readers' posthumous biographies. For example, Alexander the Great envied Achilles less for his exemplary life than for Homer's account of it. Ullyot defines the three types of decorum on which exemplary rhetoric and imitation rely, and charts their operations through Philip Sidney's poetics, Edmund Spenser's poetry, and the dedications, sermons, elegies, biographies, and other occasional texts about Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, and Henry, Prince of Wales. Ullyot expands the definition of occasional texts to include those that criticize their circumstances to demand better ones, and historicizes moral exemplarity in the contexts of sixteenth-century Protestant memory and humanist pedagogy. The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England concludes that all exemplary subjects suffer from the problem of metonymy, the objection that their chosen excerpts misrepresent their missing parts. This problem also besets historicist literary criticism, ever subject to corrections from the archive, so this study concedes that its own rhetorical methods are exemplary.
Additional text
The Rhetoric of Exemplarity advances how future readers will understand the composition and reception of elegies, eulogies, epitaphs, panegyric, and other quietly common early modern English genres that present images of idealized subjects. It equips the reader with essential concepts for reading these English genres in their historical moment.
