448 RHETORICA William E. Engel, Chiastic Designs in English Literaturefrom Sidney to Shakespeare, (Burlington, Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 158 pp. ISBN: 9780754666363 In his two previous books, Mapping Mortality (1995) and Death and Drama (2002), William Engel explored the role of memory and mnemonics in Renaissance literature. Chiastic Designs in English Literature from Sidney to Shakespeare is an extension of Engel's previous interests, but his project for this study focuses on +he "meaning underlying and motivating the persistence and transformations of chiasmus in the Renaissance" (12). Engel extends chiasmus beyond the classic crossing rhetorical structure and uses the category of "chiastic design" to talk about moments of echoing and doubling in the larger structural design of renaissance texts. In shifting the scale of chiasmus to consider the larger patterning of textual features Engel pushes the parameters of chiasmus as a rhetorical device to consider it as a larger rhetorical strategy. Engel argues that these larger chiastic patterns can be read as a technique for creating a type of intratextual reflexivity, or echoing about the action of the text, as well as prompting the reader to be reflective about their own experience encountering the text. In his second chapter Engel explores how situating mythical figures can be an example of chiastic design. One of the strongest offerings in this chapter is Engel's unpacking the figure of David within renaissance "allegorical imagination". Engel's intervention directs us to interrogate in novel ways the figure as not merely a reference, but rather a whole system of doubled meanings and crossings that are tied to David's struggles with his own imperfect humanity and sense of justice. The effect of these doubled inflections of idealized justice and human frailty prompt, according to Engel, nuanced philosophical reflection. This is achieved textually through points of conflict and consilience repeatedly being re-situated in relation to one another through echoes, crossings, and mirroring. To ground this assertion Engel offers a sustained treatment of the figure of David in Quarles's Divine Fancies as an illustration of a "poetics of interiority" that is based on moments that prompt the reader to look back on the action of the poem cycle. The effect of this doubling back is a layering of the situated complexity of David's experiences, both past and current to the action of the poem. The chiastic doubling of David's progress within the poem directly ties to the ars memorativa where mnemonics, like chiasmus, prompt the reflection necessary to create the connections between experience and knowledge. Engel also claims that the reader has a parallel meditative journey that is directly linked to the recursive consideration of the poem's action. In effect both David and the reader are guided through a reflexive understanding of justice, and their own fallibility, through Quarles's larger structural use of chiasmus. Engel dedicated the next chapter to the role of chiasmus in Sidney's Arcadia. By focusing on Sidney's use of architectonic chiasmus Engel aims to support his assertion that Sidney, and renaissance literacy circles more broadly, considered the symbolic to be explicitly connected to the principles Reviews 449 of ars memorativa. With this in mind, Engel aims to demonstrate that in Sid­ ney's poem chiasmus is technique that creates an ethos of loss and absence. In shifting his critical agenda regarding chiasmus away from reflective en­ gagement and towards the rhetorical processes of scaffolding an affective memory, Engel demonstrates the dexterity of chasimic design to achieve different rhetorical ends. Engel's treatment of Sidney's Arcadia traces out the poem's mnemonic framework and argues that Sidney's choice to restructure the poem was an authorial re-direction to structurally highlight an ethos of pervasive loss and searching that undergird the plot. Chiasmus in this context crosses back to demonstrate a perpetual lack or uncertainty, rather than the accretion of experience or knowledge as seen in Quarles. Engel argues that Sidney strategically created "echoes" between the eclogues and the main narrative to underscore the sense of searching that not only sup­ ports the hunt for love that the characters on all levels of the narrative are experiencing, but also prompts the reader to become psychologically...