This work explores the rhetorical identity of the "I" in the lament psalms of the individual, with a particular focus on how the psalmist negotiates moral agency and constructs identity within the cultural, theological, and ideological assumptions and relational structures embedded in the language of the laments.

The work approaches the identity of the psalmist in a new way, not as a form-critical question, but as a rhetorical question. The assumption is that language affords identity. Readers will become better at identifying the specific rhetorical world of the laments of the individual. The work assists readers by identifying the particular rhetorical elements of the laments and the relational structures that shape the psalmist's discursive identity.

Cottrill draws from cross-disciplinary resources (cultural anthropology, violence studies, social-scientific criticism, and literary criticism) in order to interpret and understand the particularity of the psalmist's language in new ways. The over-arching theoretical framework is that of the figured world, a culturally constructed location of interpretation, which provides a way of entering and exploring the language used by the psalmist to represent his pain to himself and others, and the assumptions about relationship, selfhood, and restoration embedded in these prayers.