Selected Essays on Rhetoric

The five essays presented hereRhetoric, Style, Language, Conversation, and Greek Literaturewere published together for the first time in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey in 18891890. Frederick Burwick brings the essays together again in this volume, introducing them by tracing the sources and development of a belletristic theory of rhetoric, which he says is one of the most original, and for a few critics, the most puzzling of the nineteenth century. Burwick makes the edition complete with a comprehensive index and a selected bibliography.