Edgar Allan Poe: Rhetoric and Style

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McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 2005 - Literary Collections - 408 pages
Critics have often charged Edgar Allan Poe with sloppy writing. Using stylistics and classical rhetorical theory, Brett Zimmerman demonstrates that Poe was in fact a brilliant and deliberate lexical technician who varied his prose style according to genre and the world views and the mental health or illness of his narrators. Zimmerman breaks new ground in Poe studies by providing a catalogue of three hundred figures of speech and thought in the author's oeuvre, including his tales, personal correspondence, literary criticism, book reviews, and Marginalia. This incisive catalogue of literary and rhetorical terms, presented in alphabetical order and amply illustrated with examples - in addition to close examinations of some of Poe's most important tales - overwhelmingly demonstrates Poe's rhetorical and linguistic dexterity putting a nearly two-hundred-year-old critical debate to rest by showing Poe to be a conscientious craftsman of the highest order.

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Contents

Poes Stylistic Versatility
3
Allegoria Chronographia and Clock Architecture
51
Catalogue of Rhetorical and Other Literary Terms
107
The Terms by Type
326
Stauffer on Poes Five Styles
337
Notes
355
Bibliography
375
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About the author (2005)

Brett Zimmerman is the author of Herman Melville: Stargazer and numerous scholarly essays in magazines and academic journals in Canada, the United States, and England.

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