Edmund Burke and the Discourse of Virtue

This book provides close readings of Burke’s public discourse and political writings.A singularly impressive scholarly work. As the author points out so deftly in his introduction, Burke’s rhetoric has been too long ignored or simply used to serve other purposes, and it has never been subjected to the close textual analysis it receives in this work. The result of Browne’s study is to present Burke and his work in a light that was clearly essential to Burke himself, one that illuminates the close connection between rhetoric construction and action that is so necessary to a fuller understanding of the man, his career, and his discourse.This book is an extremely important addition to Burke scholarship…Browne’s demonstration of the textual/contextual connections is firmly rooted in historical, critical, and theoretical scholarship and evidences a firm and broad command of relevant literature. The essays stand as an exemplar of a rich interpretive approach to rhetorical texts, an approach that can be studied with profit by young and mature critics alike.