Is the contest between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine as much a matter of style as politics? A comment

Essay from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0 (A in England), Oxford University, language: English, abstract: The aim of this essay is to analyse whether the striking differences between the political ideologies of Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke are also mirrored on the level of their use of language and thus on the level of their styles. Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and Paine's Rights of Man, 'the most successful of the many responses that Burke's pamphlet provoked' (Hodson 115), are the basis for this investigation. I will argue that the widely spread assumption that the nature of Burke and Paine's largely antithetic political ideas can be reflected in their respective styles needs to be reassessed and that - indeed surprisingly - there is no distinct/strong link between their political convictions on the one hand and their styles on the other hand.

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