This volume explores the fascinating aesthetic and social connection
between drama and rhetoric.

Inasmuch as drama seeks to keep an audience engaged, it takes on rhetorical
qualities; likewise, rhetorical endeavor may employ dramatic appeal. Centuries
ago, Aristotle's companion pieces The Rhetoric and The Poetic
generated crosscurrents of critical thought about rhetorical and dramatic
theory. Recently, such critic-theorists as Kenneth Burke, Ernest Bormann,
Elder Olson, Paul de Man, and others have stirred up these currents afresh.
The contributors to this volume take provocative new approaches to enduring
issues.

****Contents ****



PART I: Rhetorical Dimensions to the Drama: The Classical
Context
Enthymeme and the Invention of Troping in Greek Drama, August W.
Staub
Theorizing the Spectacle: A Rhetorical Analysis of Tragic Recognition,
Tom Heeney
Exile and the Kingdom: Reason as Nightmare in the Aeschylean
Vision, John Arthos

PART II: The Rhetorical in Renaissance and Neoclassical Drama

Epideictic Pastoral: Rhetorical Tensions in the Staging of Torquato Tasso's
Aminta, Maria Galli Stampino
Shakespeare's Rhetoric versus the Ideology
of Ian McKellen's Richard III, George L. Geckle
And Now for Application:
Venice Preserv'd and the Rhetoric of Textual Application, Odai Johnson

PART III: War, Politics, and the Drama
Federalist and Republican
Theatre in the 1790s, Steve Wilmer
Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Rhetoric of
Gradualism, Charles Wilbanks
Dario Fo's Angry Farce, Stanley Vincent Longman

PART IV: Contemporary Culture
Stain upon the Silence: Samuel
Beckett's Deconstructive Inventions, Leigh Anne Howard
Still Angry after
All These Years: Performing the Language of HIV and the Marked Body in
The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me, Peter Michael Pober