Abstract
This chapter considers fourteen questions related to further features of content or invention, including descriptions, comparisons, imagery, axioms and proverbs, dialogue, speakers and audiences within the text, examples, general themes, and commonplaces. It considers the writer’s use of prior reading, adaptation and imitation of source material, personal experience, humour, and pleasing of the audience. It discusses rhetorical doctrines from Erasmus, the progymnasmata, Cicero, Quintilian, Agricola, Bakhtin, and Melanchthon. The chapter concludes with an analysis of some passages from Fielding’s Tom Jones conducted in relation to questions about self-presentation, opening a text, humour, and teaching and pleasing an audience.
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Mack, P. (2017). Content 3: Further Elements. In: Rhetoric's Questions, Reading and Interpretation. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60158-8_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60158-8_6
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