Ian Robinson traces the legacy of prose writing as a form theorized and propagated as an art distinct from verse. Engaging with histories of rhetoric as well as the work of the great prose writers in English, Robinson provides a bold reappraisal of this literary form, and shows that the formal construct of the sentence itself is historically conditioned and no older than the post-medieval world. The relationship between rhetorical style and literary meaning, Robinson argues, is at the heart of the way we understand the external world.