Canning, P: Style in the Renaissance

Acknowledgements Introduction: In the Beginning was the Word Chapter One: Constructing Plausible Stories: Ideology, Conceptual Integration Theory and the Politics of Representation in George Herbert's 'JESU' Chapter Two: 'A Deed Without a Name': Murder and the Linguistics of Agency in Shakespeare's Macbeth Chapter Three: 'Bit-Part' Actors: Metonymy in Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling Chapter Four: Picturing Words: Ekphrasis and the Word-as-Image in Early Modern Poetry Conclusion: 'Being Nothing': The value of the W/word Notes Bibliography Index

Patricia Canning is a Teaching Assistant at the School of English, Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is currently developing a 'reading for well being' project (Get Into Reading) across Northern Ireland on behalf of The Reader Organisation. She runs projects in the university as well as with female prisoners in Hydebank Prison, Belfast.

Patricia Canning's adventurous interdisciplinary study brings together in new and exciting ways the two fields of linguistics and literary criticism in her examination of selected texts by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The range and detail of her analysis, evident especially in her microscopic examination of linguistic forms, cultural assumptions, and historical contexts in plays by Shakespeare and Middleton, and in the poetry of George Crashaw, is impressive. Here is a rare combination of strenuous scholarly rigour, and uncompromising analysis, replete with a full and clear awareness of what interdisciplinarity involves. A welcome new voice offering unique insights into texts that we thought we knew. -- Professor John Drakakis, University of Stirling, UK Canning's book opens new and exciting avenues for literary and stylistic investigation, while making an important contribution to the study of English Renaissance. Elegantly combining cognitive poetics focus with more traditional historically situated analysis yields a multi-faceted scholarly perspective from which scholars of many orientations can learn. The work is a model example of how the gap between linguistics and literature can be bridged for the benefit of both disciplines. -- Barbara Dancygier, University of British Columbia, Canada