Overview

Dr 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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9780198112471

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Lennard's scholarship is formidable and extensive, his talent for 'close reading' of poetry is duly sensitive, and his argument against the neglect of punctuation in the analysis of verse is convincing. --Times Literary Supplement [A] fine contribution to our sense for parentheses....Lennard's finely studied analysis is an impressive contribution to the literary scholarship which can enable us to understand this history. --Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Lennard's scholarship is formidable and extensive, his talent for 'close reading' of poetry is duly sensitive, and his argument against the neglect of punctuation in the analysis of verse is convincing. --Times Literary Supplement<br> [A] fine contribution to our sense for parentheses....Lennard's finely studied analysis is an impressive contribution to the literary scholarship which can enable us to understand this history. --Journal of English and Germanic Philology<br>

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