Comparative Rhetoric is the first book to offer a cross-cultural overview of rhetoric as a universal feature of expression, composition, and communication. It begins with a theory of rhetoric as a form of mental and emotional energy which is transmitted from a speaker or writer to an audience or reader through a speech or text. In the first part of the book, George Kennedy explores analogies to human rhetoric in animal communication, possible rhetorical factors in the origin of human speech, and rhetorical conventions in traditionally oral societies in Australia, the South Pacific,...

Classical Arab civilization produced the most extensive and highly developed bacchic tradition in world literature, In this book, Kennedy traces the history of wine poetry from its origins in sixth century Arabia to its heyday in Baghdad at the turn of the ninth century. He focusses on the work of the great Ab? Nuw=as (d. c.813), placing his wine songs in context with those of his contemporaries and with other poetic genres such as amatory, invective, ascetic, and gnomic verse.