Mark My Words: Profiles of Punctuation in Modern Literature

Description

Why are Emily Dickinson and Henry James drawn habitually to dashes? What makes James Baldwin such a fan of commas, which William Carlos Williams tends to ignore? And why do that odd couple, the novelist Virginia Woolf and the short story specialist Andre Dubus II, both embrace semicolons, while E. E. Cummings and Nikki Giovanni forego punctuation entirely? More generally, what effect do such nonverbal marks (or their absence) have on an author's encompassing vision? The first book on modern literature to compare writers' punctuation, and to show how fully typographical marks alter our sense of authorial style, Mark My Words offers new ways of reading some of our most important and beloved writers as well as suggesting a fresh perspective on literary style itself.

Lee Clark Mitchell is Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres at Princeton University, USA. He is the author of seven books, including Mere Reading: The Poetics of Wonder in Modern American Novels (Bloomsbury 2017), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year.

Mitchell's sustained insight pushes the literary beyond alphabetic letters by recovering punctuation as more than an interface between words and the grammar of their articulation. In its most telling deployments, punctuation marks the conversion of format to content, seam to semantic gesture. Reading gets closer than ever, and with new power, in this study's riveting cross section of examples. On both prose and poetry, it's a terrific book, period. * Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters, University of Iowa, USA, and author of The Value of Style in Fiction (2018) * Mark My Words is a remarkable work that shows that `what we take away from both powerful prose and poetry are not the words themselves . . . so much as the suasions that typographical marks induce in our readings.' Citing a compelling concatenation of writers--Nabokov, Dickinson, Baldwin, Cummings--this book provides fresh analyses that will be of interest to writers and readers. * Jennifer DeVere Brody, Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, and Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity, Stanford University, USA *