Teaching by example: The rhetoric of genre and the commerce of writing

This study examines the relationships among example, genre, rhetoric, and history, primarily in the Restoration and eighteenth century, as exemplarity shifts from a pattern for an idealized and aristocratic past to the sphere of the everyday in a society of increasingly commercial and domestic values. The figure of example connects history and drama with novels, periodicals, popular handbooks, and guides, providing new models for behavior in a growing print culture. I argue that hybrid forms serve as rhetorical responses to changing views of exemplarity. Chapter One introduces the terms and theoretical position of my thesis.; Subsequent chapters juxtapose canonical texts with popular forms to suggest how writers in the long eighteenth century address audiences and markets, and their identity as authors. Chapters are framed by historical debates linking example and genre to imply the relationship of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, and modern critics, to received narratives of literary history. Exemplary figures featured here often represent nostalgia for a contested past: the rake's ambiguous, mock-heroic status challenged by the fop who believes aristocratic status can be acquired through conduct books; Bolingbroke's attempt to oppose Walpole's economic dominance through exemplary history and Lockean empiricism. This attempt by an aristocratic statesman mirrors the evocation of history's authority by writers presenting examples for tradesman and apprentices. Fielding's merchant, in a network of familial relationships, represents mercantile values set against Jonathan Wild's negative example of individualist laissez faire. Goldsmith's Marlow faintly echoes earlier rakes; yet, Kate's example brings about a domestic, comic resolution that bridges the literary life of town with a nostalgic view of the country. Enlightenment historiography modifies the rhetoric of example in ways that continue to be worked out in nineteenth-century texts like Smiles' Self Help, and twentieth-century best-sellers. As a lost pattern of the past, example becomes a model for rational self-improvement. At the same time, new conceptions of the individual rest uneasily within a body of rhetoric deeply invested in transferring a traditional ethos of society and community.