The current research is mainly conducted to explore the pragmatic functions of English rhetoric in public speech. To do this, methods of close reading and case studies are adopted. The research first reveals that the boom of public speech programs helps reexamine the art of utterance, during the delivery of which English rhetoric plays an…

Edith Wharton (1862-1937), a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a distinguished female novelist at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work "The Age of Innocence" contributes much to the formation of a female literary tradition. Wharton's subversion of male discourse can be well traced in her novel "The Age of…