Style in the Renaissance

Patricia Canning is a Teaching Assistant at the School of English, Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

• 1. Introduction: 'In the beginning was the Word'; 2. Early Modern Understanding of the Monarch as a Double Body; 3. Constructing Plausible Stories: ideology, conceptual integration theory and the politics of representation; 4. Macbeth, Murder, and the Linguistics of Agency: "A deed without a name"; 5. Metonymy in Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy and Webster's The White Devil: 'Bit Part' Actors; 6. Ekphrasis and The Word as Image in Early Modern Poetry: "Iconoclash". 7. Conclusion: the 'value' of the word; Bibliography; Index.

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.