Race and rhetoric in the Renaissance
Subtitle: barbarian errors
By: Ian Smith
Edition: 1st ed.
Series: Early modern cultural studies; Early modern cultural studies
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2009
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 231
ISBN-13: 9780230620452
Description: "During the English Renaissance, the figure of the classical barbarian - identified by ineloquent speech that marked him as a cultural outsider - was recovered for stereotyping Africans. This book advances the idea that language, and not only color and religion, functioned as an important racial code. This study also reveals that way in which England's strategic projection of a "barbarous" language was meant to enhance its own image at the expense of the early modern African. Ian Smith makes use of the sixteenth-century preoccupation with language rehabilitation to tell the larger story of an anxious nation redirecting attention away from its own marginal, minority status by racial scapegoating."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [195]-216) and index.