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Goran V. Stanivukovic, “Mounting Above the Truthe”: On Hyperbole in English Renaissance Literature, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 43, Issue 1, JANUARY 2007, Pages 9–33, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cql112
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ABSTRACT
The article traces the history of theoretical definitions of hyperbole in classical and Renaissance rhetorical manuals and treatises on poetry, and explores literary uses and effects of hyperbole in a selection of literary and non-literary texts, including letters and drama, from the English Renaissance. It connects theories of hyperbole in classical treatises with those in Renaissance manuals of rhetoric, and compares those pre-modern theories to ideas about hyperbole in post-structuralist theories of eloquence. The essay also addresses the effect of hyperbole in the context of the physical stage of early modern public theatres. Some of the theoreticians included in the analysis are Aristotle, Erasmus, Quintilian, Thomas Wilson, George Puttenham, John Hoskyns, Richard Sherry and Gabriel Harvey; the writers whose uses of hyperbole this essay interrogates include William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Walter Raleigh, Spenser and John Dryden.