Edgar Allan Poe : rhetoric and style / Brett Zimmerman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Zimmerman, Brett, 1958-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849--Literary style.

Poe, Edgar Allan.

Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849--Technique.

Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849.

Technique.

Literary style.

Physical Description:

xxii, 408 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Montreal ; Ithaca : McGill-Queen's University Press, [2005]

Summary:

Many critics, including Mark Twain and T.S. Eliot, have charged Edgar Allan Poe with sloppy writing, frequently describing it as turgid. Using stylistics and classical rhetorical theory, Brett Zimmerman demonstrates that Poe was actually a brilliant and deliberate lexical technician who varied his prose style according to genre and the world views and mental state of his narrators.

Zimmerman provides an insightful close reading of some of Poe's most important short stories and breaks new ground with an incisive catalogue of three hundred rhetorical and literary terms, including figures of thought and speech, in the author's tales, personal correspondence, literary criticism, book reviews, and marginalia. Zimmerman overwhelmingly demonstrates Poe's rhetorical and linguistic dexterity, putting a two-hundred-year-old critical debate to rest by revealing the author to be a craftsman, stylist, and rhetorician of the highest order.

Contents:

1 "I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's": Poe's Stylistic Versatility 3

2 Frantic Forensic Oratory and the Rhetoric of Self-Deceit: "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat" 28

3 Allegoria, Chronographia, and Clock Architecture in "The Masque of the Red Death" 51

4 Poe's Linguistic Comedy 63

5 The Linguistic Weaponry of the "Tomahawk Man": Poe's Critical Reviews 85

Catalogue of Rhetorical and Other Literary Terms in Poe's Works 107

The Terms by Type 326

Appendix 1 Stauffer on Poe's "Five Styles" 337

Appendix 2 Paranoid Schizophrenia in "The Tell-Tale Heart" 342.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [375]-386) and index.

ISBN:

0773528997

OCLC:

57638598