The rhetoric of suffering

by Jonathan Lamb

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 tried to account for the relations between human suffering and systems of secular and divine justice. Far from crystallizing or objectifying the issue of complaint, the Book of Job seems to restore its limitless and unprecedented urgency. The Rhetoric of Suffering examines complaints that fall into this dissident and singular category, and relates their improbability to the aesthetics of the sublime, and to current theories of practice and communication. Lamb focuses on William Warburton's contentious interpretation of Job, contained in his Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (1738-1741), a prime example of the debate that emerges when Job is used as an unequivocal justification of providence.