Abstract: This survey of Central and Eastern European scholarship begins by placing rhetoric in relation to poetics and literary theory,then examines work on Byzantine rhetoric within this framework. The most striking feature of this scholarship is its formalistic tendency, which is seen above all in the works of such Russian scholars as S. Averinčev, M. Gasparov, and G. Kurbatov, but the same tendency is also evident in Polish studies on the theory of prose composition.