The aim of the thesis is to analyze the aesthetics of eulogy in the 18th century. Alongside forensic speech and deliberative speech, epideictic speech represents the third type of rhetoric category in rhetorical genre theory, which was created in ancient Greece.
Rhetorical theory traditionally attached great importance to deliberative and forensic speech, but less significance to epideictic speech. In the early modern period though, epideictic speech in theory and verbal practice became increasingly important in comparison to the other types of speech. During the 18th century, however, the discipline of rhetoric was marginalized and suppressed, which also had an effect on epideictic speech.
Due to the lack of research on the rhetorical practice of epideictic speech in the 18th century, the thesis makes a major contribution to this field. Epideictic speech will be analyzed with regard to two different dimensions: topical and textual mechanisms on the one hand and social pragmatism on the other hand. The premise of the thesis is that these two dimensions interact within a special dynamic which can be captured as the pragma-aesthetics of early modern epideictic speech.
