Politicians and Rhetoric The Persuasive Poer of Metaphor [Hardcover]

This analysis of the rhetoric of nine successfully persuasive politicians explains how their use of language created credible and consistent stories about themselves and the social world they inhabit. It explores their use of metaphors, their myths and how language analysis helps us to understand how politicians are able to persuade.Preface Style Conventions Persuasion, Speech Making?and Rhetoric Metaphor in Political Discourse Winston Churchill: Metaphor and Heroic Myth Martin Luther King: Messianic Myth Enoch Powell: the Myth of the Oracle Ronald Reagan and Romantic Myth: 'From the swamp to the stars' Margaret Thatcher and the Myth of Boedicia Bill Clinton and the Rhetoric of Image Restoration Tony Blair and Conviction Rhetoric George Bush and the Rhetoric of Moral Accounting Obama and the Myth of the American Dream Myth, Metaphor and Leadership Appendices Bibliography Index of Conceptual Metaphors Index

'This book is a fascinating exercise in the art of critical metaphor analysis of political speeches,including recent speeches by G W Bush and Obama. It addresses the vital need to raise awareness of metaphor's role in myth making, simplification by binary thinking, and affective evaluation, which often operate at an unconscious level for the audiences of political speeches. Analysis of metaphor along with other rhetorical schemes such as repetition,chiasmus and rhetorical questions,is well integrated into the author's model of political rhetoric/persuasion. The second edition helpfully includes several new references to recent work on metaphor and ideology.' - Andrew Goatly,Lingnan University,China

'In an age of growing distrust in politicians, their promises, their speeches, and their decisions, Jonathan Charteris-Black succeeds in convincing us of the 'complex art of rhetoric'. Some politicians' speeches have become salient elements of collective experiences, they are repeated over and over again, they are quoted and re-contextualised. l¾