Oganizer: Professor Lisa Raphals (University of California, Riverside)
A great deal of scholarship in recent years has focused on the rhetorical dimensions of historical, philosophical and religious narratives. That scholarship tends to be embedded in one discipline or one genre. A particularly interesting example is the problem of women's biography, which tends to be considered in isolation from other comparable rhetorical narratives. The papers in this panel attempt to open new ground, each examining a rhetorical narrative context through a comparative perspective, with significant attention to how and whether rhetorical narratives can be approached comparatively by genre, by area, or by time period. One session will focus on hagiographies and other biographical narratives. The other will address other comparative asepcts of rhetoric