Tropes And Figures In Anglo Saxon Prose

Download or read book Tropes and Figures in Anglo-Saxon Prose written by James Waddell Tupper and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2015-07-28 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Tropes and Figures in Anglo-Saxon Prose: A Dissertation Presented to the Board of University Studies of the Johns Hopkins University for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy A precise knowledge of the tropes and figures, found in the literature of any given period, is necessary to a just appreciation of an author's style and of the literary development of his time. The subject may be investigated simply from the point of view of tropes and figures as instruments of literary expression, quite independently of the author or the period; or as a means by which, on the one hand, the author makes his thought forcible or beautiful, and by which, on the other, the national trend of thought is indicated, -as, here, the peculiar product of the individual, and, there, the common property of the period. The ancient rhetoricians treated the subject in its relation to the whole body of classical writings without any special reference to individual authors. They regarded it as a branch of Rhetoric, not as a basis for the determination of the author's literary art. Gerber's work is the best modern treatise in the classical method. In it, 110 investigation is attempted of the styles of the various authors; citations are made from several languages simply as illustrations of tropes and figures. The numerous monographs which deal with this subject in the classical authors are written mostly from the point of view of individual characteristics of thought and style, and have thereby rendered valuable service to the higher criticism of the texts. The figures of speech and the texts are, necessarily, limited for each monograph. In Anglo-Saxon only certain figures of speech have been considered, and these only as they occur in poetry. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.