`Here is that welcome thing, a book which does exactly what it sets out to do...Jargon-free explanations, a helpful lay-out and well-chosen examples assist comprehension of the core material, while an outline of the champter, provided separately, enhances its continuing usefulness as a reference section' Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 37, Number 3
`Scholarly yet accessible, an excellent teaching aid and a useful reference book, this volume is - just as it says - for anyone with a serious interest in French literature' Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 37, Number 3
`thoroughly thought-through handbook ... Hawcroft thoughtfully provides memory-joggers, for he knows how fallible is our recall of technical terms. His dragnet of reference is impressively wide ... this is a very persuasive book' Walter Redfern, MLR, 96.2, 2001
Product Description
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, whether spoken or written. In the first chapter of Rhetoric: Readings in French Literature, Michael Hawcroft sets out its principles comprehensively and lucidly, providing an easily-consulted outline of key terms and a wide range of illustrative examples. Subsequent chapters explore rhetoric at work in different genres, via close reading of texts which range from the drama of Moliere, Racine, and Beckett; Montaigne, Sevigne, and Gide on the self; the prose fiction of Laclos, Zola, and Sarraute; poetry by D'Aubigne, Baudelaire, and Cesaire; and the oratory of de Gaulle and Yourcenar. Rhetorical analysis uncovers subtleties and complexities in texts which emerge as exciting dramas of communication. This is at once a handbook of rhetoric and a guide to its application to French texts from the sixteenth century to the present.
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