The Rhetoric of Exile

The Rhetoric of Exile explores the rhetorical construction of force in indirect exile and in literary responses to it. Between banishment, a compulsory exile, and expatriation, a voluntary one, many legal systems have allowed for a third model. Such an exile is pragmatic and ambiguous in nature: the degree of compulsion is never explicitly defined, but all agents involved understand that it is real. As far back as the Roman Republic, there have been exiles who felt considerable duress but could not pin it down to any specific legal document or judicial decision, and these victims of silent persecution are all the more likely to brood on the elusive force over them, and to recreate it by imaginative means. What is displaced and hidden in law - force as metonymy - returns as a potent and condensed image in literature - force as metaphor.