Afterword

This brief concluding chapter looks at Cambridge English in the 20th century and points out that its founding father, I. A. Richards, referred to Kames’s ‘great and novel venture’ in his lectures on ‘The Philosophy of Rhetoric’. It considers Raymond Williams’s valedictory Cambridge lectures, which focus on the importance of expression in English studies and seek in effect to reinstate rhetoric, though with more social and political contextualisation. It is argued that rhetoric not only represents the origins of English, but also offers a future for English through a recombining of the active,...

This brief concluding chapter looks at Cambridge English in the 20th century and points out that its founding father, I. A. Richards, referred to Kames’s ‘great and novel venture’ in his lectures on ‘The Philosophy of Rhetoric’. It considers Raymond Williams’s valedictory Cambridge lectures, which focus on the importance of expression in English studies and seek in effect to reinstate rhetoric, though with more social and political contextualisation. It is argued that rhetoric not only represents the origins of English, but also offers a future for English through a recombining of the active, performative arts of writing and speaking with the more passive, analytical, and interpretative arts of reading.