Garden Of Eloquence

M. Jourdain, a character in a Moliere play, was amazed when told he had been speaking prose all his life. Willard Espy, who has been compared to Lewis Carroll for his light-hearted and fanciful treatment of words, points out that every day we use rhetoric just as unknowingly. In this latest book, Mr. Espy has created a preposterous wonderland, a garden such as never was; and in the words of Henry Peacham (who published the first Garden of Eloquence in 1577), he has "set therein such figurative Flowers, both of Grammar and Rhetoric, as do yield the sweet savor of Eloquence." Besides its flowers, Espy's Garden is inhabited by creatures large and small, lovable and quarrelsome, beautiful and ugly, each incarnating some figure of speech (or trope)-that magical device that extends the range of language to infinity. We are all familiar with such common tropes as metaphor, hyperbole, and alliteration, but did you know that when the minister says "let us gather together" he is employing pleonasmus? Or that "it was no small task" is an example of litotes? Was Eliza Doolittle aware, when she said she wanted to sit "absobloominlutely still," that she was teaching Henry Higgins about tmesis? Metaphor, hyperbole, alliteration, pleonasmus, litotes, tmesis-these are but a sprinkling of the unforgettable Garden folk. Espy explains more than 200 rhetorical devices, dozens of them in verses sung by the tropes themselves. Each verse is followed by a definition, a comment, and examples of the usage in history, literature, and everyday speech. Thirty of the figures come visually alive in Teresa Allen's charming and witty illustrations, and word games abound throughout the book.

A dictionary of some 200 rhetorical terms with copious illustrations drawn from classic & contemporary writings. Full analyses of the various figures of speech, together with comments on the use & abuse of each one. References to music & theology give an encyclopedic quality to this highly interesting work. Also given are 40 pages from the 1577 edition, so that every term used by Peacham is defined in his own words.

In 17 BCE the Han dynasty archivist Liu Xiang presented to the throne a collection of some seven hundred items of varying length, mostly quasi-historical anecdotes and narratives, that he deemed essential reading for wise leadership. Garden of Eloquence (Shuoyuan), divided into twenty books grouped by theme, follows a tradition of narrative writing on historical and philosophical themes that began seven centuries earlier. Long popular in China as a source of allusions and quotations, it preserves late Western Han views concerning history, politics, and ethics. Many of its anecdotes are attributed to Confucius’s speeches and teachings that do not appear in earlier texts, demonstrating that long after Confucius’s death in 479 BCE it was still possible for new “historical” narratives to be created. Garden of Eloquence is valuable as a repository of items that originally appeared in other early collections that are no longer extant, and it provides detail on topics as various as astronomy and astrology, yin-yang theory, and quasi-geographical and mystical categories. Eric Henry’s unabridged translation with facing Chinese text and extensive annotation will make this important primary source available for the first time to Anglophone world historians.