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9780271084671 Academic Inspection Copy

Robert Burton's Rhetoric

An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge
  • ISBN-13: 9780271084671
  • Publisher: PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
    Imprint: PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
  • By Susan Wells
  • Price: AUD $184.00
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 14/10/2019
  • Format: Hardback 224 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: Research methods: general [GPS]
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Published in five editions from 1621 to 1651, The Anatomy of Melancholy marks a unique moment in the development of disciplines, when fields of knowledge were distinct but not yet restrictive. In Robert Burton’s Rhetoric, Susan Wells analyzes the Anatomy, demonstrating how its early modern practices of knowledge and persuasion can offer a model for transdisciplinary scholarship today.

In the first decades of the seventeenth century, Robert Burton attempted to gather all the existing knowledge about melancholy, drawing from professional discourses including theology, medicine, and philology, as well as the emerging sciences. Examining this text through a rhetorical lens, Wells provides an account of these disciplinary exchanges in all their subtle variety and abundant wit, showing that questions of how knowledge is organized and how it is made persuasive are central to rhetorical theory. Ultimately, Wells argues that in addition to a book about melancholy, Burton’s Anatomy is a meditation on knowledge itself.

A fresh interpretation of The Anatomy of Melancholy, this volume will be welcomed by scholars of early modern English, the rhetorics of health and medicine, and those interested in transdisciplinary work and rhetorical theory.


List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

1. A Monstrous Anatomy

2. Burton’s Anatomy : Genres as Species and Spaces

3. The Anatomy of Melancholy and Early Modern Medicine

4. Burton, Rhetoric, and the Shapes of Thought

5. Translingualism: The Philologist as Language Broker

6. The Anatomy of Melancholy and Transdisciplinary Rhetoric

Notes

Bibliography

Index



“Wells eloquently makes the case for Burton’s Anatomy as a key text that helps us rethink rhetoric in a number of ways: as an arbiter of narrative form, as a vehicle for cross-disciplinary learning, even as a model for education that has powerful implications today. In a time when knowledgeable activity amidst uncertainty is more important than ever, this kind of scholarly work on rhetoric feels deeply necessary, as we need to know much more about how we got here, and what to do now.”

—Daniel M. Gross, author of Uncomfortable Situations: Emotion Between Science and the Humanities

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