anastrophe

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a·nas·tro·phe

(ə-năs′trə-fē)

Inversion of the normal syntactic order of words; for example, "Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear" (Alexander Pope).

[Late Latin anastrophē, from Greek, from anastrephein, to turn upside-down : ana-, ana- + strephein, to turn; see streb(h)- in Indo-European roots.]

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

anastrophe

(əˈnæstrəfɪ)

(Rhetoric) rhetoric another term for inversion³

[C16: from Greek, from anastrephein to invert]

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

a•nas•tro•phe

(əˈnæs trə fi)

n.

reversal of the usual order of words for rhetorical effect.

[1570–80; < Greek: turning back.]

anastrophe

a rhetorical device in which the usual word order of a phrase or sentence is reversed.

anastrophe

Another word for inversion.

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Noun

anastrophe - the reversal of the normal order of words

inversion

rhetorical device - a use of language that creates a literary effect (but often without regard for literal significance)

Translations

anastrofa

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References in periodicals archive ?

Among the forty independent clauses of this digression, many ending with question marks or Woolf's characteristic semi-colons, only once does the narrator depart from conventional syntactic order, as in this anastrophe, "Venerable are letters," a departure the narrator varies by repeating the same line in normal order: "Yet letters are venerable" (Woolf 1923, 93).

A MOST COPIOUS DIGRESSION: AN ERASMIAN ANALYSIS OF THE RHETORIC OF VIRGINIA WOOLF'S COMMENTS ON LETTERS IN JACOB'S ROOM

In "Wishing Well," certain rhythmic and syntactic flourishes--the fluctuations between seven and eight syllables, between three and four accents per line, and the anastrophe of "whether such a small as this / sacrifice is worth one wish"-endowed with fluency a structure that had no correlative in its essentially static scene.

Bill Knott, I Am Flying into Myself: Selected Poems, 1960-2014

First, they were named by the Greeks and have kept the Greek terminology--isocolon, anastrophe, polysyndeton, etc.

Rhetorical questions

When we ask this question, we will find that in a grammatical sense, this line as a whole cannot be considered as a prepositional phrase; rather it should be a present participle phrase in inverted order that can be called a rhetorical anastrophe. The normal order of the line should be read like this: almost despising myself in these thoughts.