Description
- Abstract:
- “Early Modern Rhetorics of Color” takes up how color, a seemingly superficial and utterly ubiquitous feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing, acquires ethical, ideological, aesthetic, and epistemic values. The project examines 1) how skin color functions as a racialized and gendered aspect of personal and social identity, 2) why people are idiomatically said to act “under the color” of certain intentions, 3) the reason metaphor, simile, and figurative language as a whole are seen as “the colors of rhetoric,” and 4) the rationale behind colonialist emphasis on the literal colors of the Americas and those used in indigenous cultural practices. From blackface performances in London to the vibrant hues of Algonquian body paint and textiles in Virginia, early modern writing is replete with colors, but these colors never solely act on the eyes. In a period poised between scholasticism and empiricism - where color is understood neither as an essential feature of the world nor as an incidental fiction of the mind - colors inspire unpredictable sensual, emotional, and cognitive experiences. They intimate and solicit value judgments beyond the visual. Colors, thus, come to be accompanied by and associated with a labile set of ethical, ideological, aesthetic, and epistemic values. Through readings of Shakespeare, Lyly, Spenser, Jonson, Elizabeth I, Walter Ralegh, John Smith, and others, “Early Modern Rhetorics of Color” shows writers on both sides of the Atlantic trying to make sense of the world through color, but the diffuse kinds of sense color makes depend, ultimately, on the perceptual experiences of thinking, feeling, and sensing subjects.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2020
Access Conditions
- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
- Collection is open for research.
Citation
Casey, John,
"Early Modern Rhetorics of Color"
(2020).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/c1bn-ng33
