Figures of discourse in prose fiction

Abstract

The essay demonstrates the relationship between specific figures of discourse dominant in particular novels and the thematic concerns or plot patterns of each individual novel. The figures discussed are (1) enthymeme, prominent in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and important also in Joyce’s Ulysses; (2) hypallage, part of the rhetoric of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, reflecting its plot pattern and its cluster of concerns; and (3) blazon, which helps to convey the implied author’s critique of the attitudes of the first-person narrator of Lolita.