Rhetoric and the Discourses of Power in Court Culture China, Europe, and Japan
<p>Key imperial and royal courts--in Han, Tang, and Song dynastyChina; medieval and renaissance Europe; and Heian and MuromachiJapan--are examined in this comparative and interdisciplinaryvolume as loci of power and as entities that establish, influence,or counter the norms of a larger society. Contributions by twelvescholars are organized into sections on the rhetoric of persuasion,taste, communication, gender, and natural nobility. Writing fromthe perspectives of literature, history, and philosophy, theauthors examine the use and purpose of rhetoric in their respectiveareas.</p><p>In Rhetoric of Persuasion, we see that in both the third-centurycourt of the last Han emperor and the fourteenth-century court ofEdward II, rhetoric served to justify the deposition of a ruler andthe establishment of a new regime. Rhetoric of Taste examines thecourt�s influence on aesthetic values in China and Japan,specifically literary tastes in ninth-century China, the melding ofliterary and historical texts into a sort of national history infifteenth-century Japan, and the embrace of literati paintinginnovations in twelfth-century China during a time when theliterati themselves were out of favor. Rhetoric of Communicationconsiders official communications to the throne in third-centuryChina, the importance of secret communications in Charlemagne�scourt, and the implications of the use of classical Chinese in theJapanese court during the eighth and ninth centuries. Rhetoric ofGender offers the biography of a former Han emperor�s favoriteconsort and studies the metaphorical possibilities of Tang palaceplaints. Rhetoric of Natural Nobility focuses on Dante�s efforts toconfirm his nobility of soul as a poet, surmounting his non-nobleancestry, and the development of the texts that supported thepolitical ideologies of the fifteenth-century Burgundian dukesPhilip the Good and Charles the Bold.</p>
eBook, 2012
University of Washington Press, Seattle; London, 2012