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,...

Encompassing nearly a century of drama, this is the first book to provide students and scholars with a truly comprehensive guide to the early modern soliloquy. Considering the antecedents of the form in Roman, late fifteenth and mid-sixteenth century drama, it analyses its diversity, its theatrical functions and its socio-political significances. Containing detailed case-studies of the plays of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Ford, Middleton and Davenant, this collection will equip students in their own close-readings of texts, providing them with an indepth knowledge of the verbal and...