The Rhetoric of Suffering

The Rhetoric of Suffering draws on the book of Job as a touchstone for the contradictions and polemics that infect 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 eschewing questions of chronology or discursive coherence, genre or topic, the book offers considerations of Hawkesworth and the South Pacific, Goldsmith and Godwin, Hume and Walpole, Blackstone and Bentham, Burke and Longinus, Richardson and Fielding, and Blackmore and Wright.