SOURCE: "Polemic, the Rhetorical Tradition, and The Unfortunate Traveller," in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. LXIII, No. 3, July, 1964, pp. 408-21.

In the following essay, Gibbons discusses Nashe's extensive use of polemical discourse in The Unfortunate Traveller, linking it to the rhetorical tradition of his day.

Though much has been written about Thomas Nashe's implication in the Marprelate controversy and even more about his literary dispute with the Harveys, no one has examined The Unfortunate Traveller with an awareness of the polemic so manifest in it, nor has the evidence of this polemic been observed in its rhetorical context.¹ Indeed, the personal invective of the Harvey exchange is absent or veiled, and the the singularity of cause of the Marprelate dispute has become diffused among a wide variety of subjects. With but one notable exception the polemic subjects and situations have, furthermore, been attenuated by what...