apostrophe apostrophe
 a-pos'-tro-phe Gk. apo “away from” and strephein “to turn”
prosphonesis
aversio
the turne tale

Turning one's speech from one audience to another. Most often, apostrophe occurs when one addresses oneself to an abstraction, to an inanimate object, or to the absent.
  Since this figure often involves emotion, it can overlap with exclamatio.
Examples
  Antony addresses Caesar's corpse immediately following the assasination in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar:
O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of times.
—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar 3.1.254-257
Related Figures
 

 
  Sources: Ad Herennium 4.15.22 ("exclamatio"); Quintilian 9.2.38-39 ("aversio"); Aquil. 9 ("apostrophe," "aversio"); Sherry (1550) 60 ("apostrophe," "aversio," "aversion"); Peacham (1577) M4v; Putt. (1589) 244 ("apostrophe," "the turne tale"); Day 1599 90 ("apostrophe," "aversio") ; Melanchthon (1523) C8v


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Gideon O. Burton, Brigham Young University
Please cite "Silva Rhetoricae" (rhetoric.byu.edu)


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