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This chapter briefly lists some prominent features of Demosthenes' prose style and gives examples. To produce clarity he uses ordinary language, avoiding poetic and abstract expressions, and giving his sentences a clear structure. Emphasis is obtained by alternating emphatic and unemphatic words, by repetition, and by oaths. Variety is produced by questions and by such figures as hypophora, asyndeton, apostrophe, paraleipsis, and metaphor.

The book opens with a definition of literary discourse and its transcendental quality that bridges fictional characters, authors, interpretations, and readers across time and cultures. This chapter attempts to develop a social model of literary dialogue in the Romantic epoch, partly based on Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogue. In contrast with traditional Romantic discourse, which is essentially solipsistic, external interactions of the self are emphasized and dialogue expanded to provide a wider, more holistic view. This is supported by the frequent use of poetic tools, such as the rhetoric of apostrophe in Romantic literature, to provide multiple perspectives. The role of the literary auditor as one of the crucial external voices that enable the rhetoric of interaction is also discussed. This complex interrelationship between the Romantic “self” and external voices is manifested in Romantic literature, samples of which are studied in the succeeding chapters.

This chapter discusses linguistic dialogue in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in which language or discourse is offered as a means of recovery and empowerment for the story's players. Narrative apostrophe is employed to invoke the “silent auditor,” to bridge the interpretive gap between signifier and the signified. Many studies argue that this method serves to disperse the narrator's efforts to develop a coherent identity and undermines his attempts to veer away from solipsism by internalizing that which should remain part of the external milieu. The opposing voices often utilized in narrative apostrophe reveal the rhetorical construction of the self from multiple views. In the case of Frankenstein, the efforts of the monster to try and articulate its existence to the world illustrates the view that linguistic interaction is vital to one's “being.” The latter sections discuss and analyze the modes in which linguistic interchanges between the major characters are carried out.

This chapter discusses the decline in the popularity of dialogue as the main method of exposition in the nineteenth century. This is illustrated in Conrad's literary pieces and in the difficulty of interpreting his work. Traditional critics focus on the main character—Marlow's—narrative idiosyncrasies in Conrad's “Heart of Darkness.” The author posits that this may indicate Conrad's desire to establish an alternative type of dialogue in which the speaker or silent listener cannot trust or verify the statements of the narrator. This unique form of rhetoric and its implications are further analyzed and interpreted as the main character progresses through the novella's plot. The author cites how the novella becomes a sequence of apostrophes wherein each narration constitutes an attempt at dialogue, despite the lack of conventional conversational techniques and modes of corroboration. The remaining section discusses how these apparent “limitations” are transcended in Conrad's unique rhetoric.

This chapter looks at how to express possession correctly in a sentence and the instances where possession does not occur. The chapter presents the different structures related to possession, including the ‘of’ phrase and generic compound. It also clarifies the placement of the plural term in certain phrases.

Sidney's niece Mary Wroth published a long prose romance, the Urania, in 1621, along with a lyric sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus; a second part of the Urania exists in manuscript. Both works draw deeply on the writings of Wroth's family, with her aunt and father as models as well as her more celebrated uncle. They also thematise questions of family, genealogy, generation, resemblance, memory, recognition, and imitation, to create dense, highly personal texts that narrate and fantasise about Wroth's life at the same time as they offer a revisionary rereading of Sidney's own writings and literary values. Sidneian dialogue in Wroth's hands becomes a one-sided monologue of apostrophe in her sonnets, and in the rhetoric of her sonneteering lover, Pamphilia, who figures Wroth herself and is also the central character within the Urania. Both parts of the Urania develop and radically reconceive the Arcadia's rhetoric and plot logic of incompletion and aposiopesis; both parts end, like the Arcadia, in mid-sentence.

The chapter addresses the primary aspects of the ekphrasis of photographs. Using Mikhail Bahktin’s theory of the chronotope of the novel, the chapter defines what it terms “the chronotope of the photograph”, describing this as a narrative space that occurs between a photographic image and a poetic speaker. The primary example is taken from Walter Benjamin’s essay “A Brief History of Photography”.

Using Michel Foucault’s essay on calligrams, the chapter examines poems that are reproduced with the photographs that they describe and how this constellation alters the sort of ekphrasis one encounters by creating a textimage bond.The poets discussed are Richard Howard and John Logan.

Language evolved for communication, so it has “built in” features that respond to the givens of human discourse. Part III, beginning with this chapter, covers the language choices that acknowledge the immediacy of discourse, beginning with the partners in communication: the speaker or writer and the hearer or reader. The real roles of source and recipient are also constructed by the language of a text, whether or not they are made explicit. Extreme cases of fashioning the mutual roles of speakers and recipients are modeled in the salutations recommended in medieval letter-writing manuals. Typically, the role construction in a text can be made explicit when the personal pronouns creating rhetorical agents and audiences are used: I, you, we. Each of these choices has special uses and there are corresponding genres of fictional address. When there are no explicit references to the speaker and audience, the text may seem impersonal or objective, but speaker/audience roles are still assigned. The goal of discourse can be to change the relationship, or what Goffman called the footing, between the speaker and the addressee, and the constructed footing can in turn serve what Burke called the persuasive identification between the arguer and the audience. In rhetorical manuals, striking methods of speaker/audience construction were noted. The apostrophe involves specifically calling on or hailing an addressee. Arguers can also partition their audiences, dividing them into subgroups and making the whole group aware of its differences. They can also speak frankly to one subgroup in the presence of another, or even try to purge the audience and purify the remainder. Finally, arguers can ask questions in a variety of ways that turn audiences into cooperative responders.

“In eins” shares and divides the word shibboleth with an earlier poem titled “Schibboleth.” Both are poems-to-come for each other. “Schibboleth” appears to be a more traditional post-romantic lyric than “In eins,” but a close reading reveals that the poem’s heroic-masochistic first-person narrative is undermined at every point by a poetic counterpulse. The political power of the poem manifests itself at the point at which poetic language leaves mimetic representation behind. A non-naturalistic movement hin, away, disjoints the “I” and opens the poem to the voices of the dead. The trope of apostrophe emerges as the figure of this movement. As the trope of both address and elision, apostrophe marks shibboleth as the Atemwende, the breath-turn.

This chapter takes the colloquial expression “under climate change” as a prompt for thinking about Romantic renderings of the sky as a form of apostrophe or address, specifically an address to a nature that has been made absent or else is in the process of disappearing. The preoccupations with landscape and visual form that haunt each of the book's chapters are now brought to the fore, as the paintings of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner are shown to appeal—again, apostrophically, in vain—to landscape as a genre whose obsolescence echoes and confirms the fragility of nature after industrialization. After the discussion of these visual artists and a return to Keats's Hyperion poems, the chapter ends with Helen Mirra’s 2001 installation Sky-wreck and the encounter between real and ideal forms on which its imagination of an ecologically devastated but still-open future rests.

This chapter presents Marcion's poem, which introduced God as the one responsible for evil. Aurelius Prudentius Clemens wrote a counteroffensive on this insidious concept in a segment of the Hamartigenia by using dialectica to associate Marcion with the dialectic reasoning typical of ancient philosophy. In this dialectical process, truth is approached through a series of arguments and counterarguments. Prudentius uses the rhetorical devices of prosopopoeia (giving Marcion a voice) and apostrophe (responding in propria persona to Marcion's speech) to present Marcion's argument as part of a dialectic process. He argues that rational argument has led Marcion to a false conclusion—phrenesis manifesta or obvious madness—by saying that the true identity of Marcion's Creator God cannot be derived through the logic of dialectic, and must rather be derived through faith.

The sapphic imaginary bears particular implications for the construction of women as subjects in an emergent public sphere. Chapter 4 argues that erotic writings by women, especially in the form of what I call sapphic apostrophe, were able to advance class-specific protofeminist arguments in ways that reveal the seventeenth-century female subject to be something of a sapphic subject as well. These articulations of female friendship, which became prominent in tandem with the entrance of elite women into print, are too pervasive and too purposefully public to be explained wholly by the private desires of their authors. Chapter 4 thus considers why women's interests might have been served by their constitution as subjects erotically bound to one another in representation. Class relations figure centrally in the cultural work both of the texts themselves and of this chapter, as I look at a practice that peaks in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century and ebbs by the 1760s in the wake of reconfigurations of femininity that can be associated with such influential thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

This chapter enriches the volume’s overall diachronic approach with an additional transmedial perspective as it compares cases of metalepsis in archaic and classical vase-painting with violations of levels of representation in epic and lyric poetry. It focuses, first, on how characters in texts and figures in painting address the recipients, either with apostrophe (in texts) or en face gaze (in pictures). It then considers cases in which the represented world of a painting seems to acknowledge its own representation, for instance when figures apparently lean against the edges of the vessel on which they are painted. The chapter argues that medial differences have a significant impact on metalepsis: not all textual metalepses have pictorial parallels, nor can we find equivalents to all pictorial metalepses in literature. However, it concludes that ancient literature and vase-painting nevertheless share traits that reveal a distinct tendency of ancient metalepsis: in both media the boundaries between the representation, the represented object, and the recipient were less clear-cut than in our modern view. The chapter concludes by suggesting a possible reason for this in the rootedness of ancient representations in specific contexts: specifically, performative settings for literature, and pragmatic utility for painted pots.

This chapter is a critical discussion of the metaleptic phenomenon of apostrophizing fictional and/or long-dead characters. It asks what model of engagement with fiction emerges if one takes the gesture of speaking to a fictional character literally, not merely as a rhetorical trope but a meaningful speech act. In this mode of reading, modelled by an apostrophizing author as first reader of their own text, apostrophe suggests that characters are, somehow, still available to be interacted with. Apostrophe therefore serves as an invitation for readers to invest in characters and form relationships with them, for instance loving them or mourning for them. By discussing four rather different examples—Homeric epic, Sapphic lyric, a bucolic poem by Theocritus, and a progymnasma by Musonius Rufus—the chapter argues that apostrophe not only repays reading as a model of how readers engage with fiction, but that each text offers its own version of this engagement.

This chapter is an analysis of the metaleptic effect of apostrophe in narratives that are embedded in a lyric frame, using the example of the Pindaric epinician ode. In apostrophe, a narrator ‘turns away’ from his default addressee, but in contrast to epic, Pindaric lyric has many addressees: the chapter therefore begins with an analysis of the Pindaric ‘you’, a topic much less explored than the Pindaric ‘I’, and concludes that in an epinician ode the victor and his family are the default addressee. Turning to the three instances of narrative apostrophe in Pindaric myths, the chapter argues that, owing to the hymnic associations of early Greek apostrophe, these instances serve to anticipate a mythical (Pelops) or historical (Battus) character’s status as a hero enjoying hero cult. These apostrophes suggest the movement of a character into the world of the ode’s performance (epiphany) rather than the movement of the narrator and his narratee into the world of the mythical past (immersion or enargeia). The conclusion is drawn that whereas modern metalepsis usually has an illusion-breaking effect and is typically found in experimental texts, the narrative apostrophes in Pindar show that ancient metalepsis rather tends towards increasing the authority of the narrator and the ideological force of his tale.

This chapter revisits the challenges of thinking about narrative metalepsis in lyric contexts by considering the diverse corpus of Catullus. Catullus’ most obviously narrative poem—poem 64—offers rich possibilities for metaleptic readings, and the chapter particularly investigates the ways in which the boundary between the poem’s outer narrative and its inset, ostensibly ecphrastic story is navigated by two powerfully subjective presences, the narrator and Ariadne, by such means as apostrophe and mise en abyme. Yet Catullus is typically classified as a lyric poet, and the chapter also examines poems that fuse the narrative and lyric modes, looking at potentially hymnic addresses to divinities across the corpus, and the tension in poem 68 between, on the one hand, the tendency to establish a whole series of nested narrative levels through ring composition and simile, and, on the other, the pull of the lyric mode towards a unified poetic ‘present’. There is a particular emphasis on the interaction among speech acts in the first, second and third person. Catullus himself appears in all three ‘persons’ as a character in the corpus, but is also a Roman author in whose real existence we believe, and the chapter concludes by returning against this background to Genette’s concern that metalepsis prompts us to ask whether we may belong to some narrative—as Catullus indeed does.

“A Rescue That Comes Too Late”: Figure and Disfiguration in Contemporary Ecopoetics Chapter abstract: This chapter turns to the contemporary mode of ecopoetics as an exploration of the problems of poiesis in a time of accelerating ecological destruction. Ecopoetics as a distinctive mode emerges in the post-Kyoto Protocol era, when the problem of how to respond to planetary environmental degradation has become increasingly urgent. The ecopoetics texts of the chapter present an extended redescription of human capacities and aesthetic making in light of anthropogenic crisis. Discussing works by Brenda Hillman, Hoa Nguyen, Brenda Coultas, and Allison Cobb, the chapter highlights how their use of prosopopoeia and apostrophe dramatizes uncanny and defamiliarized dimensions of relationality. These portrayals raise questions regarding the culpability for environmental destruction and the limits of anthropogenic ingenuity to fix, remake, or salvage.