Review by Choice Review
The most thorough treatment of the formative influences on English prose style from the postmedieval era, Reformation, and Enlightenment, this volume presents an almost microscopic analysis that concentrates on the origin, development, and transformation of the English sentence from one era to the next. Adopting the view that the changes in the English sentence reflect evolving historical, cultural, and linguistic pressures, Robinson (Univ. of Wales, UK) develops a cogent discussion of the adaptation of prose style through the works of representative writers such as William Tyndale, Miles Coverdale, Thomas Cranmer, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare (in the prose passages in the plays), the Puritan pamphleteers, and John Dryden. The author supplements his discussion with invaluable appendixes on the history of the sentence, punctuation, and cursus (or the means of bringing utterances, spoken or written, to closure). Highly recommended for graduate and research collections. A. C. Labriola Duquesne University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
