- Title Information
- Title
- Early Modern Rhetorics of Color
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Casey, John
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- creator
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Newman, Karen
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Advisor
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Egan, James
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Kuzner, James
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Corporate
- Name Part
- Brown University. Department of English
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- sponsor
- Origin Information
- Copyright Date
- 2020
- Physical Description
- Extent
- vi, 190 p.
- digitalOrigin
- born digital
- Note:
thesis
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2020
- Genre (aat)
- theses
- 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.
- Subject (fast)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/00868499")
- Topic
- Color
- Subject (fast)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/01710960")
- Topic
- English literature--Early modern
- Language
- Language Term (ISO639-2B)
- English
- Record Information
- Record Content Source (marcorg)
- RPB
- Record Creation Date
(encoding="iso8601")
- 20200720
- Access Condition:
rights statement
(href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/")
- In Copyright
- Access Condition:
restriction on access
- Collection is open for research.
- Identifier:
DOI
- 10.26300/c1bn-ng33
- Type of Resource (primo)
- dissertations