This is a book which anyone interested in language, rhetoric, composition, or critical theory will wish to own—and plunder, for ideas, insights, understanding, and jokes. A brilliant job."—Hayden White, Professor of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz
Quinn has managed to do what I would have thought impossible: turned a discussion of dozens of rhetorical figures—hyperbaton, heniadys, isocolon—into a book that is both a delight to read and a living refutation of most current rules of style. Offering examples that range from the Bible through Shakespeare and James Joyce to Joe Jacobs, he quietly and wittily demonstrates that—but why should I, by giving away his show, commit hysteronproton?"—Wayne Booth, Professor of English at the University of Chicago