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Rhetorical Genres and the Eikon Basilike From the seventeenth century onwards, political movements have attracted writers-from geniuses to hacks-who have attempted to articulate the principal arguments of their movements in pamphlets, books, broadsides, and other tracts. Those tracts that succeeded struck aresonant chord in the readers' culture and experience and became apart of the culture as they drew upon it. Such tracts thus become literary "texts" of their culture. Most Americans should immediately think of Tom Paine's revolutionary tracts, now apart of the official canon of American literature. Contextual and historical studies, while necessary, often prove to be insufficient explanations of the power and effect of political tracts. The methods of literary criticism, particularly the study of ways and means by which audiences respond to texts, may enable the student of political movements to achieve a fuDer appreciation of primary sources. Recent genre criticism proves highly useful to this end. In his chapter on genre criticism in The PoliticaJ Unconscious, Fredric Jameson shows how literary genres perform two valuable functions apart from the purely critical. First, they function historical1y to 10eate particular genres in time. We all recognize the romance, for example, as a genre characteristic of the
Explorations in Renaissance Culture – Brill
Published: Dec 2, 1985
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