InWanton Words, Madhavi Menon intimately and expertly couples classical and Renaissance handbooks of rhetoric with canonical Renaissance plays and demonstrates their shared propensity to speak about sex - often transgressive sex - in the same instance that they speak about the workings of language.
While other studies of rhetoric have confined their analyses to local questions of interpretive interest, Menon introduces rhetoric into the largely medico-juridical realm of studies on Renaissance sexuality. In doing so, she suggests that rhetoric allows us to think through the erotics of language in ways that pay most attention to thefrissonof English Renaissance drama. Sustained deconstructive parsings of tropes - metaphor, metonymy, allegory, catechresis, and more - enables their wantonness to emerge in subjects usually considered unrelated to rhetoric: race inOthello, colonialism inThe Tempest, tragedy inRomeo and Juliet, and cowardice inThe Roaring Girl.
eISBN: 978-1-4426-8322-8
Subjects: Language & Literature
Table of Contents
You are viewing the table of contents
You do not have access to this
book
on JSTOR. Try logging in through your institution for access.