Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

Johnson, Christopher D.

ISBN 10: 0674053338 / ISBN 13: 9780674053335

Published by Harvard University Department of, 2010

About this Item

Seller Inventory # mon0003807988

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)
• Publisher: Harvard University Department of
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674053338
• ISBN 13: 9780674053335
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

This book offers a detailed, comparatist defense of hyperbole in the Baroque period. Focusing on Spanish and Mexican lyric (Góngora, Quevedo, and Sor Juana), English drama (King Lear and translations of Seneca), and French philosophy (Descartes and Pascal), Christopher D. Johnson reads Baroque hyperbole as a sophisticated, often sublime, frequently satiric means of making sense of worlds and selves in crisis and transformation. Grounding his readings of hyperbole in the history of rhetoric and literary imitation, Johnson traces how rhetorical excess acquires specific cultural, political, aesthetic, and epistemological value. Hyperboles also engages more recent critiques of hyperbolic thought (Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Cavell), as it argues that hyperbole is the primary engine of a poetics and metaphysics of immanence.

About the Author

Christopher D. Johnson is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.