Twenty-eight illustrations are included."--Jacket.

The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies surveys the latest advances in rhetorical scholarship, synthesizing theories and practices across major areas of study in the field and pointing the way for future studies. Edited by Andrea A. Lunsford and Associate Editors Kirt H. Wilson and Rosa A. Eberly, the Handbook aims to introduce a new generation of students to rhetorical study and provide a deeply informed and ready resource for scholars currently working in the field.

Through two previous editions, The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric has not only introduced new scholars to interdisciplinary research but also become a standard research tool in a number of fields and pointed the way toward future study. Adopting research methodologies of revision and recovery, this latest edition includes all new material while still following the format of the original and is constructed around bibliographical surveys of both primary and secondary works addressing the Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, and eighteenth through twentieth century periods within the history of rhetoric. The Present State of Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric doesn’t simply update but rather recasts study in the history of rhetoric. The authors—experienced and well-known scholars in their respective fields—redefine existing strands of rhetorical study within the periods, expand the scope of rhetorical engagement, and include additional figures and their works. The globalization and expansion of rhetoric are demonstrated in each of these parts and seen clearly in the inclusion of more female rhetors, discussions of historical and contemporary electronic resources, and examinations of rhetorical practices falling outside the academy and the traditional canon. New to this edition is a cumulative review of twentieth-century rhetoric along with a thematic index designed to facilitate interdisciplinary or specialized study and scholarly research across the traditional historical periods. As programs incorporating rhetorical studies continue to expand at the university level, students and researchers are in need of up-to-date bibliographical resources. No other work matches the scope and approach of The Present State of Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric, which carries scholarship on rhetoric into the twenty-first century.

As a speechwriter, orator, and politician, Demosthenes captured, embodied, and shaped his time. This Handbook explores the many facets of his life, work, and time, giving particular weight to his social and historical context and thereby illustrating the interplay and mutual influence between his rhetoric and the environment from which it emerged.

This book argues that narrations of rhetorical performances in late antique literature can be interpreted as a reflection of the ongoing debates of the time. Competition among cultural elites, strategies of self-presentation and the making of religious orthodoxy often took the shape of narrations of rhetorical performances in which comments on the display of oratorical skills also incorporated moral and ethical judgments about the performer. Using texts from late antique authors (in particular, Themistius, Synesius of Cyrene, and Libanius of Antioch), this book proposes that this type of narrative should be understood as a valuable way to decipher the cultural and religious landscape of the fourth century AD. The volume pays particular attention to narrations of deficient rhetorical deliveries, arguing that the accounts of flaws and mistakes in oratorical displays and rhetorical performances reveal how late antique literature echoed the concerns of the time. Criticisms of deficient deliveries in different speaking occasions (declamations, public speeches, oratorical agones, school exercises, sermons) were often disguised as accusations of practising magic, heresy or cultural apostasy. A close reading of the sources shows that these oratorical deficiencies hid struggles over religious, cultural and political issues.

In ancient Athenian courts of law, litigants presented their cases before juries of several hundred citizens. Their speeches effectively constituted performances that used the speakers’ appearances, gestures, tones of voice, and emotional appeals as much as their words to persuade the jury. Today, all that remains of Attic forensic speeches from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE are written texts, but, as Peter A. O’Connell convincingly demonstrates in this innovative book, a careful study of the speeches’ rhetoric of seeing can bring their performative aspect to life. Offering new interpretations of a wide range of Athenian forensic speeches, including detailed discussions of Demosthenes’ On the False Embassy, Aeschines’ Against Ktesiphon, and Lysias’ Against Andocides, O’Connell shows how litigants turned the jurors’ scrutiny to their advantage by manipulating their sense of sight. He analyzes how the litigants’ words work together with their movements and physical appearance, how they exploit the Athenian preference for visual evidence through the language of seeing and showing, and how they plant images in their jurors’ minds. These findings, which draw on ancient rhetorical theories about performance, seeing, and knowledge as well as modern legal discourse analysis, deepen our understanding of Athenian notions of visuality. They also uncover parallels among forensic, medical, sophistic, and historiographic discourses that reflect a shared concern with how listeners come to know what they have not seen.

Recent archaeological discoveries, coupled with long-lost but now available epigraphical evidence, and a more expansive view of literary sources, provide new and dramatic evidence of the emergence of rhetoric in ancient Greece. Many of these artifacts, gathered through onsite fieldwork in Greece, are analyzed in this revised and expanded edition of Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle. This new evidence, along with recent developments in research methods and analysis, reveal clearly that long before Aristotle’s Rhetoric, long before rhetoric was even stabilized into formal systems of study in Classical Athens, nascent, pre-disciplinary “rhetorics” were emerging throughout Greece.

Greek and Roman traditions dominate classical rhetoric. Conventional historical accounts characterize Roman rhetoric as an appropriation and modification of Greek rhetoric, particularly the rhetoric that flourished in fifth and fourth centuries BCE Athens. However, the origins, nature and endurance of this Greco-Roman relationship have not been thoroughly explained. Roman Rhetoric: Revolution and the Greek Influence reveals that while Romans did benefit from Athenian rhetoric, their own rhetoric was also influenced by later Greek and non-Hellenic cultures, particularly the Etruscan civilization that held hegemony over all of Italy for hundreds of years before Rome came to power.

Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics contributes to the recovery and understanding of ancient rhetorics in non-Western cultures and other cultures that developed independently of classical Greco-Roman models. Contributors analyze facets of the rhetorics as embedded within the particular cultures of ancient China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the ancient Near East more generally, Israel, Japan, India, and ancient Ireland.

Fifty Years of Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Selected Readings, 1968-2018 celebrates the semicentennial of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, bringing together the most influential essays included in the journal over the past fifty years. Assessed by members of the Rhetoric Society of America, this collection provides advanced undergraduate and graduate students with a balanced perspective on rhetorical theory and practice from scholars in both communication studies and rhetoric and writing studies. The volume covers a range of themes, from the history of rhetorical studies, writing and speaking pedagogy, and feminism, to the work of Kenneth Burke, the rhetoric of science, and rhetorical agency.