Through a Looking-Glass: Invention and Imagination in the Visual Rhetoric of William Caxton's Mirrour and Description of the World and Stephen Hawes's Pastime of Pleasure

This paper explores the intersections of visual rhetoric, cognition, and phenomenology in two early illustrated print texts, William Caxton's Mirrour and Description of the World and Stephen Hawes's Pastime of Pleasure. Through this analysis, I argue that the visual, material features of these works (illustrations, inscriptions), in addition to their spatial figures and metaphors (mirrors, colors, and measurements), mediate and connect reader to image, perceiver and perceived object, and rhetorical form and matter. Caxton's Mirrour and Hawes's Pastime portray rhetoric as ultimately dependent on the visual imagination, or fantasy, of the reader.