Redescribing renaissance literature as a battleground of competing "theologies of language," Baumlin reads Shakespeare's Hamlet, Donne's Songs and Sonets, and Milton's "Lycidas" within a revisionist history of rhetoric: these works, Baumlin ...

This collection offers the first comprehensive discussion of the history, theory, and pedagogical applications of kairos, a seminal and recently revised concept of classical rhetoric.

Examining Donne's poetry and his increasingly sophisticated use of rhetoric, Baumlin argues that there are four distinct theories of historical rhetoric - the incarnational, the transcendental, the sceptical and the sophistic - which foster ...