ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a more comprehensive reading of representations of wonder by assessing the extent to which the topics of invention and the figures of elocution were able to inscribe encounters with the wonderful and the wonder generated thereby. It focuses, on the one hand, on the generation of appropriate pathos, that is to say, on set-pieces of affective rhetoric which put the reader in direct contact with the wonder gestalt. On the other hand, if the truth of the representations is not always primarily - and sometimes never - to the real world, the chapter searches for some sort of answer to the question ‘What do these representations actually represent?’ The literal ineffability of objective reality does not mean that reality cannot be written about, negotiated or changed; although ineffable, it can be rendered meaningfully. Meaningfulness does not always match objective reality, but if it is consistent with consensual probabilities, it may constitute truth of a kind.
