Figuratively Speaking: Rhetoric and Culture from Quintilian to the Twin Towers (Classical Inter/Faces) - Softcover

Spence, Sarah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0715635131 ISBN 13: 9780715635131

Publisher: Bristol Classical Press, 2007

Synopsis

Although rhetoric is a term often associated with lies, this book takes a polemical look at rhetoric as a purveyor of truth. Its purpose is to focus on one aspect of rhetoric, figurative speech, and to demonstrate how the treatment of figures of speech provides a common denominator among western cultures from Cicero to the present. The central idea is that, in the western tradition, figurative speech - using language to do more than name - provides the fundamental way for language to articulate concerns central to each cultural moment. In this study, Sarah Spence identifies the embedded tropes for four periods in Western culture: Roman antiquity, the High Middle Ages, the Age of Montaigne, and our present, post-9/11 moment. In so doing, she reasserts the fundamental importance of rhetoric, the art of speaking well.

About this title

About the Authors

Sarah Spence is Professor of Classics at the University of Georgia.

Susanna Morton Braund is Professor of Latin Poetry and Its Reception at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She has published extensively on Roman satire, Latin epic poetry and Seneca, including for Bloomsbury The Roman Satirists and Their Masks (1998).

Paul Cartledge is A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University, UK, and a Fellow of Clare College. He has published extensively on Greek history over several decades, including The Cambridge Illustrated History of Ancient Greece (1997, new edition 2002), Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past (2004, revised edition 2005), Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice (2009), and Democracy: A Life (2016).

Edition details

• Publisher: Bristol Classical Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0715635131
• ISBN 13: 9780715635131
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160