But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed VerseDr Johnson disapproved of parentheses and wouldn't use them; and for three centuries grammarians have argued that they are subordinate, additional, unnecessary, irrelevant, and damaging to the clarity of argument. But for Marlowe, Marvell, Swift, Coleridge, Byron, Browning, Eliot, Geoffrey Hill, and Derek Walcott (to name only poets) parentheses have been emphatic, original, necessary, relevant, and essential to the clarity of argument. They also intensify satire. Dr Lennard offers both a new history of the poetic use of lunulae (the marks of parenthesis) from their first appearance in England in 1494 to the present day, and detailed case-studies of individual poets who exploited lunulae. In combination the historical development of use and the individual's practice in a given period reveal the impact on literary composition of technological, philosophical, and political pressures, and the importance for the reader of regarding punctuation as a resource. |
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Page 77
... reading aloud . Any reader who , reading silently , regarded every opening lunula as a cue to skip forward to the closing lunula , would be reading curiously and incompletely73 . The eye can move about the page with ease , and has no ...
... reading aloud . Any reader who , reading silently , regarded every opening lunula as a cue to skip forward to the closing lunula , would be reading curiously and incompletely73 . The eye can move about the page with ease , and has no ...
Page 79
... reading . What is at stake here , modes of reading , is not and cannot be equated with literacy or with élite reading . While it is true that such a ramification of the private life as private writing and reading requires the leisure ...
... reading . What is at stake here , modes of reading , is not and cannot be equated with literacy or with élite reading . While it is true that such a ramification of the private life as private writing and reading requires the leisure ...
Page 148
... reader - serve constantly to remind the reader that she is reading , and what she is reading . In effect , Byron inherited from Sterne , and further developed , Swift's technique of interpolating conversational tones for satirical ends ...
... reader - serve constantly to remind the reader that she is reading , and what she is reading . In effect , Byron inherited from Sterne , and further developed , Swift's technique of interpolating conversational tones for satirical ends ...
Contents
Colluccio Salutati De Nobilitate Legum et Medicine 1399 | 4 |
Samuel Whitgift Defense of the Auns were 1574 1819 | 18 |
William Shakespeare Sonnets 1609 | 42 |
Copyright | |
15 other sections not shown
Common terms and phrases
Andrew Marvell Appleton House argument attributions of speech Bodleian Library brackets Browning Browning's Burnt Norton Byron century Christopher Ricks Clarendon Press clause Coleridge Coleridge's compositor context conventions dashes distinction Don Juan edition eighteenth Eliot Elizabethan empty lunulae English English Studies example exploitation of lunulae Faber figure Folio Four Quartets function genre grammatical graphic exploitation Harmondsworth Hero and Leander Hollow Men Honan Ibid indicate instance inverted commas italics John joke language letter lines literary London lunulae lyric mark Marvell Marvell's meaning metaphor Miscellaneous Poems modern moon narrative notes ontological Oxford parenthesis passage Penguin phrase play poet poetic poetry printed prose Prufrock punctuation Puttenham Quartets quotation quoted reader reading reference remarked rhetorical rhyme satire sense sentence sententia Shakespeare sonnet Sordello stanza suggests Swift syntactical T. S. Eliot technique thought tone Tristram Shandy typographical verse visual vocatives voice words writing written