The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages

"How does one understand and manipulate figurative language? How does one evoke and harness emotion constructively? And how does one recall while revivifying the ambiguous compositions of earlier poets in different traditions for an immediate audience and for projected future audiences? In postmodern terms, these questions for the medieval poet invite scholarly attention to heteroglossia, stylistic polyphony, and the orchestration of various levels of figurative language."--BOOK JACKET.