The genre of logic and artifice: Dialectic, rhetoric, and English dialogues, 1400-1600, Hoccleve to Spenser

This study examines the genre of dialogue in English across a two-century period in order to investigate both the complexities of the literary form and the transition from medieval to Renaissance. After a review of the scholarship on dialogue, Chapter 1 makes the argument for a "dialectical" literary history as the theoretical foundation. Such a historical method accounts for contextualizing dialogue in two of the language arts of the university curriculum: dialectic and rhetoric. A third section places dialogue within current discussions of genre theory, differentiating it from drama, although the two forms share the same "situation of enunciating.";In Chapter 2, still part of the "orientation" of the study, early English dialogues are contextualized within institutional educational practices. Centering on an exposition of Reginald Pecock's Donet, dialogue is linked to literacy from the elementary stages through the most advanced type of debate---from catechism and primer through disputation. In this period, the conscious mind was structured like a dialogue.;Chapters 3 and 4 are comparative case studies taking one dialogue from each century. Chapter 3 deals with dialogues on death and dying. Thomas Hoccleve's Lerne to Dye, which inculcates a dialectical method of self-examination in the reader, is compared with Thomas More's Dialogue of Comfort , which uses dialectic to support the unity of reason and faith in the praeparatio ad mortem. Chapter 4 compares two dialogues of advice to the prince: Alain Chartier's Freende and Felaw, which explores the responsibilities of the public intellectual---the vox politica---to the common weal; and Edmund Spenser's Vewe of the present state of Irelande which engages "Machiavellian rhetoric" with its argument in utramque partem to both appropriate and subvert ideology. In each of the five dialogues, the interlocutors' positioning is found to be highly complex. Fifteenth-century dialogues reveal a strong rationalist tendency in a period known for the "waning" of intellectualism; sixteenth-century dialogues reveal continuities with the preceding era, dissecting points of view through the many-sidedness of this "genre of doubt."...