Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Note on spelling and references
- Introduction: the figures in Renaissance theory and practice
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- CHAPTER 5 Prosopopoeia: the speaking figure
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Notes
- Suggestions for further reading
- Index
CHAPTER 5 - Prosopopoeia: the speaking figure
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Note on spelling and references
- Introduction: the figures in Renaissance theory and practice
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- CHAPTER 5 Prosopopoeia: the speaking figure
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Notes
- Suggestions for further reading
- Index
Summary
Literature is full of voices. This is clearest in those kinds of writing – plays, monologues, and the like – that present nothing but the speaking voice. But even a narrator can be thought of as speaking in a voice; indeed, everything we read can be attributed to some sort of person, can be thought of as spoken by a character. When we pick up a love sonnet we wonder about the character who speaks its words. We have no way of telling if the voice is that of a real or an imaginary lover; and knowing that the sonnet is by a particular author will only help if we are happy to identify the person presented by the poem with the person of the author. A familiarity with rhetoric will teach us to be cautious, to think about the poem as an exercise in creating a lifelike speaking voice. We may still choose to think that this voice is that of the author, but rhetorical theory will remind us that such self-representation is no different from the representation of another, real or imagined, that even when we speak for ourselves we are wearing a mask, though of our own making.
There is something intrinsically literary – fictive – about the creation of speaking voices. In The Defence of Poesy, Philip Sidney argues that poetry is better at teaching moral lessons than either philosophy or history.
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- Information
- Renaissance Figures of Speech , pp. 97 - 112Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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