Entertainment / Literature / Anastrophe: Inverted order of words or events as a rhetorical scheme. Anastrophe is specifically a type of hyperbaton in which the adjective appears after the noun when we expect to find the adjective before the noun. For example, Shakespeare speaks of 'Figures pedantical' (LLL 5.2.407). Faulkner describes 'The old bear . . . Not even a mortal but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time.' Lewis Carroll uses anastrophe in 'Jabberwocky,' where we hear, 'Long time the manxome foe he sought. / So rested he by the Tumtum tree . . . .' T. S. Eliot writes of 'Time present and time past,' and so on. Particularly clever anastrophe can become a trope when it alters meaning in unusual ways. For instance, T. S. Eliot writes of 'arms that wrap about a shawl' rather than 'shawls that wrap about an arm' in 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.' Alternatively, we can use the term anastrophe as a reference to entire narratives in which the sequence of events are chopped into sections and then 'shuffled' or 'scrambled' into an unusual narrative order. An example of this type of anastrophe might be the sequence of events in Quentin Tarentino's film Pulp Fiction or Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five. Contrast with periodic sentence.
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