Handbook of Literary Rhetoric - by Heinrich Lausberg (Leather Bound)

About the Book

Lausberg's Handbook of Literary Rhetoric is an internationally acclaimed, standard reference work on rhetorical techniques in classical literature, ancient and modern. This translation makes it available for the first time to the English-speaking world.

Book Synopsis

Lausberg's Handbook of Literary Rhetoric, here made available for the first time in English, received high critical acclaim on its first publication in 1963. It is a monumental work of extraordinary erudition, organisation and comprehensiveness, and enjoys unrivalled authority in its formal description of rhetorical techniques. The present edition is a translation of the second edition of 1973, which was reprinted in 1990. The Handbook has for many years been a standard reference work for all engaged in the study of literature and rhetoric. This translation will ensure its accessibility to a new generation of students of rhetoric.

Review Quotes

'...this English translation needs no recommendation. The only issue here is the quality of the translation - and it is uniformly excellent.'
Edgar Krentz, Religious Studies Review, 2000.
From the reviews of the German edition:
'Lausberg's two-volume work is a testimony to tremendous industry, encyclopedic knowledge, and the power to order tightly and systematize. It offers an exhaustive inventory, that is, a taking stock of not only the theoretical rhetoric of antiquity (including of the French), of the formal poetical, linguistic-architectonic phenomena and rules, aspects and concepts of rhetoric drawn from the cultivated language of the great masters, but of the whole technique of manipulating language.'
H. Wolf, Muttersprache 72, 1962.
'...the extraordinary usefulness of the immense work which L. has produced by critically incorporating the entire bulk of ancient rhetoric.'
W. Kraus, Romanische Forschungen 75, 1963.
'It merits sincere admiration, how the Professor of Romance Languages and Literature at the University of Münster...has immersed himself in the broad field of ancient rhetoric in a way which makes his Handbook...a welcome tool, useful equally to philologists of the classical as well as modern languages.'
W. Schmid, ASNS 200, 1963.
'In addition to its more literary approach, the virtues of Lausberg's Handbuch include the author's judgment, its wide historical span, its clear organization, and its extensive indices. Lausberg's Handbuch has been the reference work to which I first turn for technical information about rhetoric, and I have been recommending it to my students and readers of my books for over thirty years. It has, however, never attained in the English-speaking world the status of a basic reference tool that it deserves. Thus the appearance of an English translation is a happy event for rhetorical studies.'
George A. Kennedy, from the foreword.

About the Author

Heinrich Lausberg (+1992), was Professor of Romance Languages and Literature, University of Münster, from 1949 until his move to the Pädagogische Hochschule, Paderborn, in 1972. His other publications include Elemente der Literarischen Rhetorik (1949) and Romanische Sprachwissenschaft (1956).