Lee Clark Mitchell is Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres at Princeton University, USA. He is the author of seven books, including Mere Reading: The Poetics of Wonder in Modern American Novels (Bloomsbury 2017), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year.

Mitchell's sustained insight pushes the literary beyond alphabetic letters by recovering punctuation as more than an interface between words and the grammar of their articulation. In its most telling deployments, punctuation marks the conversion of format to content, seam to semantic gesture. Reading gets closer than ever, and with new power, in this study's riveting cross section of examples. On both prose and poetry, it's a terrific book, period.

• AcknowledgmentsPrologue: What Can Punctuation Do?1. Silence: Hemingway’s Periods2. Hesitation: Baldwin’s Commas3. Interruption: James’s Dashes4. Rupture: Dickinson’s Dashes5. Expansion: Woolf’s Semicolons6. Hemorrhage: Joyce, Morrison, Saramago, Sebald7. Enjambment: Cummings, Williams, Giovanni8. Incarceration: Nabokov’s Parentheses9. Plenitude: Faulkner’s ArrayEpilogue: Punctuation as StyleBibliographyIndex

Lee Clark Mitchell is Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres at Princeton University, USA. He is the author of seven books, including Mere Reading: The Poetics of Wonder in Modern American Novels (Bloomsbury 2017), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year.

Mitchell's sustained insight pushes the literary beyond alphabetic letters by recovering punctuation as more than an interface between words and the grammar of their articulation. In its most telling deployments, punctuation marks the conversion of format to content, seam to semantic gesture. Reading gets closer than ever, and with new power, in this study's riveting cross section of examples. On both prose and poetry, it's a terrific book, period.

• AcknowledgmentsPrologue: What Can Punctuation Do?1. Silence: Hemingway’s Periods2. Hesitation: Baldwin’s Commas3. Interruption: James’s Dashes4. Rupture: Dickinson’s Dashes5. Expansion: Woolf’s Semicolons6. Hemorrhage: Joyce, Morrison, Saramago, Sebald7. Enjambment: Cummings, Williams, Giovanni8. Incarceration: Nabokov’s Parentheses9. Plenitude: Faulkner’s ArrayEpilogue: Punctuation as StyleBibliographyIndex