ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of Chinese rhetoric studies since the publication of Chen Wangdao’s Prolegomenon to Rhetoric in 1932. After introducing the rhetoric system of Prolegomenon, especially its 38 figures of speech, the chapter traces the later developments along several lines: the proliferation of figures of speech, systems of passive rhetoric and the theory of conventions of speech and theme-specific studies. In the final two sections, the chapter points out the problems and inadequacies and identifies the urgent task of building a crowd-sourcing corpus of Chinese rhetoric examples.
