Robert Burton's Rhetoric

Susan Wells is Professor of English Emerita at Temple University. She is the author of Sweet Reason: Rhetoric and the Discourses of Modernity; Out of the Dead House: Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine; and "Our Bodies, Ourselves" and the Work of Writing.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments 1. A Monstrous Anatomy 2. Burton's Anatomy : Genres as Species and Spaces 3. The Anatomy of Melancholy and Early Modern Medicine 4. Burton, Rhetoric, and the Shapes of Thought 5. Translingualism: The Philologist as Language Broker 6. The Anatomy of Melancholy and Transdisciplinary Rhetoric Notes Bibliography Index

"The title page of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) promises to dissect its subject "philosophically, medicinally, historically"-and as if that were not enough, Burton regales readers with theology, astrology, philology, and much more besides."-D. M. Moore, Choice "Wells eloquently makes the case for Burton's Anatomy as a key text that helps us rethink rhetoric in a number of ways: as an arbiter of narrative form, as a vehicle for cross-disciplinary learning, even as a model for education that has powerful implications today. In a time when knowledgeable activity amidst uncertainty is more important than ever, this kind of scholarly work on rhetoric feels deeply necessary, as we need to know much more about how we got here, and what to do now."-Daniel M. Gross, author of Uncomfortable Situations: Emotion Between Science and the Humanities