The Rhetoric of Suffering draws on the book of Job as a touchstone for the contradictions and polemics that infect various C18th works - poetry, philosophy, political oratory, accounts of exploration, commentaries on criminal law - which tried to account for the relations between humansuffering and systems of secular and divine justice. Deliberately eschewing questions of chronology or discursive coherence, genre or topic, Jonathan Lamb offers considerations of Richardson and Fielding, Hawkesworth and the South Pacific, Goldsmith and Godwin, Hume and Walpole, Blackstone and Bentham, Burke and Longinus, and Blackmore and Wright ofDerby. Asking why it was that standard consolations, which had worked for centuries, suddenly stopped working, or were treated as insults by people who felt peculiarly isolated by misery, this wide-ranging account of the improbability of complaint in the eighteenth century offers an answer. Far from crystallizing or objectifying the issue of complaint, the book of Job seems to restore its limitless and unprecedented urgency. The Rhetoric of Suffering examines complaints that fall into this dissident and singular category, and relates their improbability to the aesthetics of thesublime, and to current theories of practice and communication. Lamb focuses on William Warburton's contentious interpretation of Job, contained in his Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (1738-1741), a prime example of the debate that emerges when Job is used as an unequivocal justification ofprovidence.

Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain presents a fresh, interdisciplinary approach to the current research on pain from a variety of scholarly angles within Literature, Film and Media, Game Studies, Art History, Hispanic Studies, Memory Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, and Law. Through the combination of these perspectives, this volume goes beyond the existing structures within and across these disciplines framing new concepts of pain in attitude, practice, language, and ethics of response to pain. Comprised of fourteen unique essays, Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain maintains a common thread of analysis using a historical and cultural lens to explore the rhetoric of pain. Considering various methodologies, this volume questions the ethical, social and political demands pain makes upon those who feel, watch or speak it. Arranged to move from historical cases and relevance of pain in history towards the contemporary movement, topics include pain as a social figure, rhetorical tool, artistic metaphor, and political representation in jurisprudence.

The Bible is by nature rhetorical. Written to persuade, biblical texts have influenced humans beyond what their authors ever imagined. Influence: On Rhetoric and Biblical Interpretation invites readers to think critically about biblical rhetoric and the rhetoric of its interpretation.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Americas is a trans-cultural collection of studies on visual treatments of the phenomena of suffering and pain in early modern culture. Ranging geographically from Italy, Spain, and the Low Countries to Chile, Mexico, and the Philippines and chronologically from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, these studies variously consider pain and suffering as somatic, emotional, and psychological experiences. From examination of bodies shown victimized by brutal public torture to the sublimation of physical suffering conveyed through the incised lines of Counter-Reformation engravings, the authors consider depictions of pain and suffering as conduits to the divine or as guides to social behaviour; indeed, often the two functions overlap.

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech has become an icon of American public culture, its imagery and words profoundly influencing the civil rights debate. In The Rhetoric of Redemption Bobbitt applies Kenneth Burke's theory of guilt-purification-redemption in a close, critical analysis of the speech, developing and examining the implications of Burke's redemption drama in contemporary public discourse. He studies the impact of the speech over time, arguing that, while King's speech contains an inspirational vision of national redemption, it does so by omitting the real difficulties of overcoming America's racial divisions.

This book provides a rhetorical manual for political and business leaders to motivate followers even in times of hardship. It covers the fine art of persuasion and argues that there are four speeches every leader has to know: the opening speech, the executioner speech, the consolation speech, and the farewell speech. The authors explore how leaders could speak in order to appear credible to an audience, and they argue that the leader has to take on suffering and give meaning to the suffering people experience. The book analyzes speeches from a wide variety of speakers, including Sir Winston Churchill, Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela, and Angela Merkel, and ends with a rhetorical dictionary for leaders to help readers familiarize themselves with helpful terms from rhetorical theory.