But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse

by John Lennard

For three centuries grammarians have argued about the necessity of parentheses. While some consider them subordinate, additional, irrelevant, and even damaging to the clarity of argument, Lennard's history explores how writers such as Marlowe, Swift, Coleridge, Browning, Derek Walcott, and e.e. cummings used them in their work as vehicles for pointing dramatic gesture, controlling tone, adding humor, and intensifying satire, in addition to contributing to the clarity of argument. Lennard offers both a new history of the poetic use of parentheses from their first appearance in England in 1494 to the present day, and detailed case-studies of five major poets who exploited them. He reveals how in each period the patterns of literary use have reflected, and continue to reflect, technological, philosophical, and political developments.

Genres: Nonfiction

340 pages, Hardcover

First published January 2, 1991

About the author

John Lennard (born 1964) read English at New College, Oxford, took an MA at Washington University in St Louis, and a DPhil. back at New College. After teaching for the Open University and the University of London, he was Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, from 1991-8, and Professor of British and American Literature at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, from 2004-09. He is now an Associate Member and Director of Studies in English at Hughes Hall, Cambridge, and a freelance writer as well as the general editor of Humanities-Ebooks' Genre Fiction Sightlines and Monographs series.

Besides almost all books, he likes cats, cricket, mountains and forests, architecture, punctuation (and its peculiar history), red wine, honky-tonk piano, blues and folk, rugs, knots, jigsaws, crosswords, pottery, Golden Age Dutch fine art, and astronomy.