POLEMICS- A few definitions


 
short notes on modes of persuasion


 
pamphlet a small treatise, usually only a few pages and unbound on some matter of topicality; Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal , that the poor of Ireland should eat their own Children. "Dr.John Campbell once looking into a pamphlet at a bookseller's shop, liked it so well as to purchase it; and it was not until he had read it half way through that he discovered it to be of his own composition..."(Sutherland 78). From the 16th century, the French public was kept informed of current events by the occasionels , a sort of chap book occasioned by a specific event ie the appearence of a seven headed dragon in Malta. More scurrilous or factually dubious were called canards .


chapbook a cheap popular book on an entertaining subect for the people, sold by chapmen. Revived in the 1880's by the Leadenhall Press and the illustrator Joseph Crawhall ie Olde ffrendes wyth newe Faces , 1883.


broadside see Albrecht Durer's illustration to a poem on the dangers of syphilis. and his broadside on the first rhinoceros in Europe. French popular prints, imageries, are associated with the town of Epinal, hence, Images d'Epinal .


sermons John Donne and Sidney Smith sermons; Laurence Sterne. The sermon in Herman Melville's Moby Dick .


lecture reading something aloud or declaiming to an audience; E.H.Gombrich , The Sense of Order , The Wrightsman Lectures, Phaidon 1980. Sir Denis Donoghue, The Arts without Mystery, the 1982 Reith Lectures in Expanded Form, BBC London 1983


thesis a proposition laid down or stated


dissertation the vehicle of arguing of theses


guide book Baedeker , the standard guide books to travelling published by the German firm. The picturesque guide books of William Gilpin in the eighteenth century.