ABSTRACT
An intensifying preoccupation with the historical relationships among language, meaning, and experience marks what has been called ‘the linguistic turn’ in recent historiography. Historians have increasingly given serious attention to a view long urged by certain literary critics, sociolinguists, and cultural anthropologists, namely that rhetoric can be regarded less as a vehicle for transmitting information than as a mode of social action that in giving an account of the world imposes a structure and meaning upon it. Language, even language that purports simply to describe, often provides not so much a transcription of life as a model for reordering cultural reality. If language does have such social functions, historians have reasoned, then especially in periods of cultural upheaval one should expect to find particular rhetorical forms that seek both to make sense of a disturbing situation and to articulate a plan by which things can be brought into a more reassuring and satisfying order.1
