Defining Visual Rhetorics

Studing the relationship of visual images to persuasion, this book analyzes a wide variety of visual modes of communication that demonstrate some of the variety among the many kinds of texts that could be considered instances of visual rhetoric. There is also a wide variety of rhetorical situations in which these texts are operative, with their attendant variety of rhetorical methods, motives and cultural assumptions. This book attempts to capture a small part of the wide range of work that is possible when a field begins to take seriously the study of images as important cultural and rhetorical forces, along with the infinate range of possibilities for those who are interested in studying rhetorical transactions of all kinds. The editors of this volume seek to demonstrate that every new turn in the study of rhetorical practices reveals more possibilities for study, discussion and wonder. The visual turn is just the latest of these, but it has revealed an inexhaustible supply of new questions, problems and objects of study.