Literature and the Culture of Lying Before the Enlightenment

Hadfield, Andrew

doi:10.1080/00393274.2013.850952

Cited by 15 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 31 publications

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“…In our postmodern (and ostensibly post-truth) age we are still fascinated by mendacity and dissimulation, but such themes were also the subject of contentious debate in the pre-Enlightenment (pre-Kantian) era. Early modern theologians and men of letters were fixated with dissimulation and equivocation (Hadfield 2013;Berensmeyer and Hadfield 2015). The doctrine of equivocation (as espoused by Jesuits, Waldesians and others) aimed to allow the speaker to avoid religious persecution by permitting him to deliberately mislead the authorities while maintaining a pure conscience.…”

Section: Historical Coordinatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“An Infinite and Endless Liar”: Paroles as a Case Study of the Pragmatics of Lying in Shakespeare

Beville

2021

Linguæ &Amp; - Rivista Di Lingue E Culture Moderne

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Lying is part of our life and part of our literary canon, the choice to lie, not lie or almost lie is both a moral and linguistic one. In the present paper lying, and related concepts such as deliberate obfuscation and deceptive implicatures, will be examined from a pragmatic, specifically neo-Gricean perspective. The purpose of this study is to determine the role of deception in the process of characterisation, with a particular focus on the form and function of the mendacious language of Paroles, the “infinite and endless liar” in All’s Well That Ends Well. Following the analysis of current pragmatic definitions of lying, this article proposes a distinction between Off-Record Verbal Deception (ORVD) and prototypical lies in the analysis of textual examples, in order to understand how these strategic linguistic choices affect the construction of character.

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Section: Historical Coordinatesmentioning

confidence: 99%