The Renaissance saw a renewed and energetic engagement with classical rhetoric; recent years have seen a similar revival of interest in Renaissance rhetoric. As Renaissance critics recognised, figurative language is the key area of intersection between rhetoric and literature. This book is the first modern account of Renaissance rhetoric to focus solely on the figures of speech. It reflects a belief that the figures exemplify the larger concerns of rhetoric, and connect, directly or by analogy, to broader cultural and philosophical concerns within early modern society. Thirteen authoritative...

This volume is a collection of articles based on papers presented at the 5th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics at Cambridge in 1987. It draws together important state-of-the-art' studies in the syntax, phonology, morphology and semantics of Old, Middle and Modern English by prominent figures in the field into a single volume. Core theoretical areas are well represented and there are also major papers in dialectology, stylistics, metrics, socio-historical linguistics and the history of English linguistics.The volume is dedicated to the memory of Professor James P....