Share
Evolution English Prose, 1700-1800: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture (in English)
Carey Mcintosh (Author)
·
Cambridge University Press
· Paperback
Evolution English Prose, 1700-1800: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture (in English) - Carey Mcintosh
$ 37.57
$ 41.99
You save: $ 4.42
Choose the list to add your product or create one New List
✓ Product added successfully to the Wishlist.
Go to My WishlistsIt will be shipped from our warehouse between
Thursday, June 13 and
Friday, June 14.
You will receive it anywhere in United States between 1 and 3 business days after shipment.
Synopsis "Evolution English Prose, 1700-1800: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture (in English)"
Between 1700 and 1800 English prose became more polite and less closely tied to speech. A large scale feminisation of literary and other values coincided with the development of a mature print culture; these two historical trends make themselves felt in the evolution of prose. In this book Carey McIntosh explores oral dimensions of written texts not only in writers such as Swift, Defoe and Astell, who have a strong colloquial base, but also in more bookish writers, including Shaftesbury, Johnson and Burke. After 1760, McIntosh argues, prose became more dignified and more self-consciously rhetorical. He examines the new correctness, sponsored by prescriptive grammars and Scottish rhetorics of the third quarter of the century; the new politeness, sponsored by women writers; and standardisation, which by definition encouraged precision and abstractness in language. This book offers support for a hypothesis that these are not only stylistic changes but also major events in the history of the language.
