The Rhetoric of Suffering Reading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth Century [Hardcover]

The Rhetoric of Sufferingprovides a fresh approach to such topics as the rise of the novel, sociability of sentiment, and the communitarian emphasis in eighteenth-century literature. Lamb draws on the Book of Job as a touchstone for the contradictions and polemics found in various eighteenth-century works--poetry, philosophy, political oratory, accounts of exploration, commentaries on criminal law--which try to account for the relations between human suffering and systems of secular and divine justice. Deliberately downplaying questions of chronology or discursive coherence, genre, or topic, he offers considerations of Richardson and Fielding, Hawkesworth and the South Pacific, Goldsmith and Godwin, Hume and Bolingbroke, Blackstone and Bentham, Burke and Longinus, and Blackmore and Wright of Derby.

Specialists in philosophy, political literary theory, and the 18th century will find much to think about. --Choice

This significant investigation...bristles with insights....essential reading for anyone interested in the way universals...threaten the particularities of experience. --Religious Studies Review

Lamb has effectively integrated the topics-suffering, complaint, consolation, theodicy, and the sublime-that are most germane to the Job narrative and to eighteenth-century interpretations both theoretical and literary. --Christianity and Literature

Mr. Lamb brings to his task impressive learning together with an up-to-date theoretical apparatus, and one cannot help but admire the ingenuity with which he imposes unity and coherence on a diverse range of materials. --The Scriblerian