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Thesis ID: CBB001560828

The Politics of Metaphor in Seventeenth-Century England (2007)

University of Virginia
Maus, Katharine E.
Publication date: 2007
Language: English

Publication Date: 2007
Edition Details: Advisor: Maus, Katharine E.
Physical Details: 301 pp.

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Metaphors; analogies Linguistic or semantic analysis Rhetoric in scientific discourse 17th century England Sprat, Thomas Harvey, William Bacon, Francis, 1st Baron Verulam Hobbes, Thomas

This dissertation examines figurative language as a vehicle of cultural and political change. Covering a range of seventeenth-century writers who turn tritely familiar metaphors into powerful tools of persuasion, I demonstrate that metaphor proves indispensable to the construction of revolutionary discourses throughout the century. Each chapter is organized around a central trope or image pattern that helped an innovative writer to envisage a new philosophy, reformist movement, or political transformation: for Francis Bacon, crowning nature with metaphors of sovereignty was the way to make scientific reform appeal to King James I; for Puritan writers at mid-century, militarizing the standard image of England as garden was a means of intertwining the causes of civil war with those of agrarian improvement and spiritual self-defense; for Thomas Hobbes, the radical revision of the analogy of the body politic was the key to establishing an immortal commonwealth; for Bacon, William Harvey, Thomas Sprat, and other advocates of natural philosophy, figuring knowledge as a commodity was a way to emphasize the practical value of experimental science. In all these cases, I argue, conventional metaphors are politically acting and acted upon: they are stabilizing forces, tempering the introduction of new ideas and ordering the confusion of cultural change within a familiar rhetorical frame, even while the metaphors themselves are destabilized, subtly modified or dramatically transformed according to the writer's historical circumstances and rhetorical needs. This study moves beyond the conception of figurative language as "mere" literary or rhetorical embellishment and furthers the recognition of metaphor's substantive place in seventeenth-century thought, even in the emergence of modern science itself. My argument revises the established opinion that the empirical revolution, emphasizing "things" over words, killed the richly metaphoric language of correspondence that characterized the medieval and early modern worldview and replaced it with a dry, figureless prose of definition and differentiation. Instead, this work hopes to contribute to a much-needed reappraisal of metaphor's importance in shaping the philosophic discourses of Bacon, Harrington, Hobbes, Sprat, and other seventeenth-century voices of change.

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Description Includes discussion of Hobbes, Bacon, Sprat, and Harvey. Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/09 (2008). Pub. no. AAT 3284741.

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