Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England: Tales of Turning

✍ Scribed by Abigail Shinn

• Publisher: Springer International Publishing;Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 262
• Series: Early Modern Literature in History
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book is a study of English conversion narratives between 1580 and 1660. Focusing on the formal, stylistic properties of these texts, it argues that there is a direct correspondence between the spiritual and rhetorical turn. Furthermore, by focusing on a comparatively early period in the history of the conversion narrative the book charts for the first time writers’ experimentation and engagement with rhetorical theory before the genre’s relative stabilization in the 1650s. A cross confessional study analyzing work by both Protestant and Catholic writers, this book explores conversion’s relationship with reading; the links between conversion, eloquence, translation and trope; the conflation of spiritual movement with literal travel; and the use of the body as a site for spiritual knowledge and proof.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter ....Pages i-xi
Introduction: Tales of Turning (Abigail Shinn)....Pages 1-27
Take Up and Read: The Convert and the Book (Abigail Shinn)....Pages 29-76
Converting Souls and Words: Tropes, Eloquence and Translation (Abigail Shinn)....Pages 77-118
Narrative Topographies and the Geographies of Conversion (Abigail Shinn)....Pages 119-168
Witnessing the Body: Corporeal Conversions (Abigail Shinn)....Pages 169-211
Conclusion: Bunyan’s Turn (Abigail Shinn)....Pages 213-221
Back Matter ....Pages 223-255

✦ Subjects

Literature; Early Modern/Renaissance Literature; British and Irish Literature; Theatre History; Christianity