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The Rhetoric of Suffering

Reading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth Century

Jonathan Lamb author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:3rd Aug '95

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The Rhetoric of Suffering cover

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 human suffering 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 of Derby. 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 the sublime, 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 of providence.

The range of his reading is wide, and the detail sometimes stimulating. His discussion of Clarissa is especially notable. * The Times Higher Education Supplement *
This study will not surprise specialists in 18th-century British literature, but it will be a revelation to most everyone else. * Old Testament Abstracts, Vol. 19, 1996 *
a work of many-sided erudition ... The author provides a devastating critique of the theodicy of Job's comforters and their eighteenth-century counterparts. * John A. Newton, The Expository Times *

ISBN: 9780198182641

Dimensions: 242mm x 163mm x 25mm

Weight: 722g

342 pages