The Garden Of Eloquence 1593

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.

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.

This comprehensive bibliography lists some 500 source texts published in the British Isles or abroad from 1479 to 1660 and more than 2,000 works of secondary literature from 1900 to the present.

Reformation Fictions rehabilitates a body of little-known Elizabethan texts. It takes some twenty polemical Protestant dialogues written predominantly by puritan clerics, and for the first time gives them a literary, historicist and, to a lesser extent, theological reading.

Thomas Hobbes claimed to have founded the discipline of civil philosophy. This book offers a new reading of his intellectual development, arguing that he was dubious about the place of rhetoric in civil society and came to see it as a pernicious presence within philosophy - a position from which he did not retreat.

This book examines Edmund Spenser's essays. It presents the criticisms of John Dryden, which are determined by his own preoccupations than by his reading of other critics, and contains three larger sections (covering the periods 1579-1600, 1600-1660, 1660-1715) into which all this material falls.