The Imperfect Friend: Emotion and Rhetoric in Sidney, Milton and Their ConextsMany writers in early modern England drew on the rhetorical tradition to explore affective experience. In The Imperfect Friend, Wendy Olmsted examines a broad range of Renaissance and Reformation sources, all of which aim to cultivate 'emotional intelligence' through rhetorical means, with a view to understanding how emotion functions in these texts. In the works of Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), John Milton (1608-1674), and many others, characters are depicted conversing with one another about their emotions. While counselors appeal to objective reasons for feeling a certain way, their efforts to shape emotion often encounter resistance. This volume demonstrates how, in Renaissance and Reformation literature, failures of persuasion arise from conflicts among competing rhetorical frameworks among characters. Multiple frameworks, Olmsted argues, produce tensions and, consequently, an interiorized conflicted self. By situating emotional discourse within distinct historical and socio-cultural perspectives, The Imperfect Friend sheds new light on how the writings of Sidney, Milton, and others grappled with problems of personal identity. From their innovations, the study concludes, friendship emerges as a favourite site of counseling the afflicted and perturbed. |
From inside the book
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... conflicts between socio - cultural categories articulated in books on rhetoric , counsel , and friendship . Dennis Hutchinson , Master of the New Collegiate Division , John Boyer , Dean of the College , and Richard Saller , Provost at ...
... cognition of things. However, this view, though reiter- ated frequently in treatises on self-knowledge and analyses of rhetoric, 6 The Imperfect Friend conflicts with the actual multiplicity of Counselling the Unstable Self 5.
... conflicts with the actual multiplicity of discourses that shape emotion. While acknowledging the power of a transparent cognitive scheme of emotion in the imaginations of early modern writers, I draw attention to conflicting practices ...
... conflict with a Protestant emphasis on 'overcoming evil' 'with good,' 'and by small /Accomplish- ing great things, by things deem'd weak /Subverting worldly strong' (PL XII.565–8). By revising the terms of honour competition to focus on ...
... conflict and the selves that emerge in conversation about it. Seeking to understand emo- tion as it is shaped and experienced through words in the English Renaissance and Reformation, I was led to study disguise, friendship, faction ...
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