In Southern Hyperboles: Metafigurative Strategies of Narration, Michał Choiński confronts the often paradoxical and excessive elements of southern literature, focusing on dominant narrative modes and representation strategies in works produced from the early 1930s to the late 1950s. With renewed attention to renderings of the gothic and grotesque, Choiński argues that modernist literature from the U.S. South often deploys the trope of hyperbole, which escalates contrasts and disrupts the sense of the normal.
„In this sophisticated and entertaining study, Michał Choiński shows how seven stars of southern fiction brilliantly exploit figurative frames – hyperbole more than other – to underpin the unforgettable style and rhetoric of their storytelling”– Michael Toolan
Read an entry about the book on LSU Press blog.
Michał Choiński explores the language of the key preachers of the “Great Awakening” of the mid-eighteenth century, and seeks to explain the impact their sermons exerted upon colonial American audiences. The revival of the 1739-43 is recognized as an important event in American colonial history, formative for the shaping of the culture of New England and beyond. Choiński highlights a variety of inventive rhetorical mechanisms employed by these ministers, and shows how they evolved into what came to be called the ‘rhetoric of the revival’.
Read the review in Jonathan Edwards Studies.