Odious Praise - Eric MacPhail

This Book Reveals A Tradition Of Thought Overlooked In Our Intellectual History But Enormously Influential Even Now: The Tradition Of Odious Praise. Distinct From More Conventional Rhetorical Exercises, Such As Panegyric Or The Funeral Oration, Odious Praise Uses Acclaim To Censure Or To Critique. This Book Reassesses The Genre Of Praise-and-blame Rhetoric By Considering The Potential Of Odious Praise To Undermine Consensus And To Challenge A Society's Normative Values.surveying Literature From Ancient Greece To Renaissance Europe, Eric Macphail Identifies A Tradition Of Epideictic Rhetoric That Began With The Sophists But Was Cultivated And Employed Most Vigorously By Renaissance Political Thinkers.