Download Free The Rhetorical Theory Of Hugh Blair Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Rhetorical Theory Of Hugh Blair and write the review.

During the British Enlightenment, the correlation between effective communication and moral excellence was undisputed—so much so that rhetoric was taught as a means of instilling desirable values in students. In Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue, Mark Garrett Longaker explores the connections between rhetoric and ethics in the context of the history of capitalism. Longaker’s study lingers on four British intellectuals from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century: philosopher John Locke, political economist Adam Smith, rhetorical theorist Hugh Blair, and sociologist Herbert Spencer. Across one hundred and fifty years, these influential men sought to mold British students into good bourgeois citizens by teaching them the discursive habits of clarity, sincerity, moderation, and economy, all with one incontrovertible truth in mind: the free market requires virtuous participants in order to thrive. Through these four case studies—written as biographically focused yet socially attentive intellectual histories—Longaker portrays the British rhetorical tradition as beholden to the dual masters of ethics and economics, and he sheds new light on the deliberate intellectual engineering implicit in Enlightenment pedagogy.
Relying on the author’s established expertise in rhetorical theory and political communication, this book re-contextualizes Romantic rhetorical theory in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to provide a foundation for a Neo-Romantic rhetorical theory for our own time. In the process, it uses a unique methodology to correct misconceptions about many Romantic writers. The methodology of the early chapters uses a dialectical approach to trace Romanticism and its opposition, the Enlightenment, back through Humanism and its opposition, Scholasticism, to St. Augustine. These chapters include a revisionist analysis of the church’s treatment of Galileo in the course of showing how difficult it was for scientific study to be accepted in the academic world. The study also re-conceptualizes Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and Edmund Burke as bridge figures to the Romantic Era instead of as Enlightenment figures. This move throws new light on the major artists of the Romantic Era, who are examined in chapters seven and eight. Chapter nine focuses on Percy Bysshe Shelley and his development of the rhetorical poem, and thereby provides a new genre in the Romantic catalogue. Chapter ten uses the foregoing to analyse and reconceptualize the rhetorical theories of Hugh Blair and Thomas De Quincey. The concluding chapter then synthesizes their theories with relevant contemporary rhetorical theories thereby constructing a Neo-Romantic theory for our own time. In the process, this book links the Romantics’ love of nature to the current environmental crisis.
First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Traces the influence of Cartesian psycho-physiology & the British empiricism on British rhetoricians of the late eighteenth century.
"In her examination of the eighteenth-century transition from classical to modern perspectives in British rhetorical theory, Lois Peters Agnew argues that this shift was significantly shaped by resurgent influences of Stoic ethical philosophy. Eager to preserve the stability jeopardized by changing political, social, and economic conditions, theorists of the period found in the Stoic principle of sensus communis the possibility of constructing a collective identity across a fragmented society. To that end, Agnew states, prominent rhetoricians turned to the works of the Roman Stoics and to their ethical system as adapted in the writings of Cicero and Quintilian in particular." "In tracing Stoic strains in eighteenth-century language theories, Agnew argues that writers such as Adam Smith, Henry Home, Lord Kames, Hugh Blair, George Campbell, and Richard Whately drew upon Stoic ideas and the earlier work of Lord Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and Thomas Reid in their integration of Stoic ethics and rhetorical theory. Deeply concerned with the effects of granting individuals moral autonomy, these intellectuals found in Stoicism a vocabulary for responding to this issue, as Stoic notions of individual sensory experiences, personal moral development, and public virtue confirmed and expanded the interconnectivity between private deliberation and communal cohesion. Thus, Agnew argues, their familiarity with ancient thought enabled British rhetoricians to craft from Stoic ideas distinctly eighteenth-century perspectives on how rhetoric could not only accomplish specific practical goals but also prepare individuals to fulfill their ethical potential to the community."--BOOK JACKET.