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This essay tests the definition of an institution as ‘an assemblage that organises, transmits, and validates’ something, ‘and that self-consciously represents itself as doing so’ that is offered in the introduction to this collection, particularly as it applies to large, diffuse institutions such as Authorship. I argue that much of the organization, transmission, and validation of authors that makes Authorship an institution is done by seemingly minor, but highly self-conscious microgenres, such as the sessions poem or the stylistic imitation. I then explore this idea by considering the phenomenon of Miltonic imitations, which detach John Milton’s manner from his exalted matter and antimonarchic politics in order to use it as a clever means of making familiar (and often highly unMiltonic) topics new. In so doing, they suggest that the essence of ‘Milton’ is somehow to be found in his style and so are, both individually and collectively, organizing, transmitting, and validating ‘him’. At the same time, these imitations are making the case that Authorship, as an institution, has the right and the duty to make such pronouncements about the essence of authors. Similar kinds of pronouncements were made through other microgenres, including the use of Milton’s ‘head’ as a shop sign for booksellers and scenes of Milton’s ghost interacting with other writers, both living and dead
The author’s reflection takes off from Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other or, the Prosthesis of Origin. The chapter proceeds by assessing the hesitant answer given by Barbara Cassin in response to a question from the audience (can we ever learn a second language to the level of our first?) at the end of a lecture entitled ‘More Than One Language’. Her answer is negative on the whole, and she evokes Hannah Arendt’s attachment to her native German. From these two points of departure the chapter seeks to give an account of what we mean by a ‘Mother tongue’, starting with a diachronic account. The Mother tongue isn’t a unitary entity; its construction is the result of a continued process of linguistic interpellation of the speaker; it is therefore the product not so much of an individual as of a social relation. Two detours, through Lucien Sève’s Marxist anthropology and the ‘tetraglossic’ theory of Henri Gobard, help account for this individual-cum-social construction of a speaking subject. The acquisition of a second Mother tongue can then be envisaged, a process that duplicates the acquisition of the original Mother tongue, thus giving a positive answer to the question addressed to Cassin.
This chapter examines an overlooked connection between patriotism and paranoia, arguing that patriotic love conditions suspicion and enmity born from perennial uncertainty over others’ love of nation. In John Neal’s Seventy-Six (1823), love of country breeds both suspicious minds and suspicious affects. This historical romance of the Revolutionary War demonstrates that paranoia is a set of affects in addition to the mental properties for which it is more commonly understood. For this reason, paranoid patriotism becomes transmissible among persons – and in literature, through style. This observation is significant because literary criticism has traditionally emphasized paranoia’s affinities with narrative, particularly conspiracy theory, and, more recently, with interpretation, namely, the paranoid’s search for coherent explanation and order, or the hermeneutics of suspicion. Neal’s novel insists that we also recognize paranoia as a trait of style.
This chapter compares two reading lists of Greek literature, one from the Augustan Age and one from the Second Sophistic: Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ On Imitation and Dio of Prusa’s letter On Training for Public Speaking (oration 18). Although several scholars have argued that the two lists are similar, this chapter argues that they are fundamentally different. Dionysius prefers Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus and Demosthenes, he ignores Hellenistic and imperial writers, and he demands that his students work hard. Dio recommends Menander, Euripides, Xenophon and Aeschines, he includes orators from the Augustan Age, and he tells his addressee that laborious training is not needed. In many points Dio’s reading list corresponds more closely to Quintilian’s contemporary canon (in Institutio oratoria book 10) than to Dionysius’ On Imitation. Three factors can explain the differences between the reading lists presented by Dionysius and Dio: their audiences, the literary preferences of the Augustan Age and the Flavian Age, and the genres of their works. Dionysius’ reading list is part of a serious rhetorical treatise which foregrounds the ‘beauty’ of classical Greek literature. Dio’s reading list is presented in a light-hearted letter which adopts a more pragmatic (and at times humoristic) approach to rhetorical imitation.
The Conradian fauna range from the albatross to the yearling and contain more than 150 different species of nonhuman animal. Despite the biodiversity, it is easy to overlook Conrad’s animals because they most frequently appear in metaphors and similes: at first sight, they lack agency, physical presence and independent meaning. But contrary to an articulated evaluative ideal of animal studies, Conrad’s animal metaphors invite reflection on human–animal relations, and demonstrate that an author can write attentively, sympathetically and thoughtfully on animals, despite primarily mentioning them in metaphors. The unreality effect, which I argue unites Conrad’s unconventional animal metaphors, confronts the reader to question the reality of the fictional construct. The unconventional sayings that produce this unreality effect all say: we have the appearance of a marginal, incidental detail but we are one of the most complicated structures in the text.
Chapter 7 explores voices at the margin of society in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. To the extent this novel on seafaring is autobiographical, it also explores Conrad himself as a marginal subject. The novel is one of the most sympathetic portrayals of a class of people frequently considered to be marginal: a multinational group of physical laborers paid a meager wage, living in harsh and deadly conditions, executing their menial jobs heroically (with notable exceptions). To move from the margin to the center, take up the pen and write a compelling story about this life for the middle-class literary establishment – first published in the conservative W. E. Henley’s The New Review in 1897 – is the part of Conrad’s achievement I focus on in this chapter. The chapter explores how Conrad makes his readers listen to the voice of the sailors, reflect on the value of their work, and appreciate the importance of seemingly menial, physical labor – like the heroism of serving coffee, which the novel discusses.
The difference between literary language and flowery prose. Checking adjectives and adverbs are really doing a job. Detail implies significance: description needs a reason. Description should produce an effect rather than draw attention to itself as an effect. Why clichés endure – and why we should beware them. Metaphors and similes – keeping them real. The debate over modifiers. Muscular verbs. All description comes from a particular standpoint. Describing place. When detail is relevant and how much is too much. Chekhov’s gun. Telling details. Showing instead of telling.
‘We all know, deep in our egotistical little hearts, when we have written something that has no function in the text other than to show off what good writers we think we are. We have at this point stopped communicating with the reader and are being self-indulgent: we have stopped doing our job and are doing something else.’
While stylistic variation in attention-based models has been foundational to sociolinguistic theory (Labov 1972a; Trudgill 1974), other studies (e.g. Coupland 1985; Eckert 1989; Drummond 2018; Snell 2018) conceptualise style as a resource used in the context of identity construction. I synthesise these two approaches to sociolinguistic style and consider social meaning in the context of variable attentional load. Informed by a study of lexical variation in Cornwall, I account for an inverted style pattern with recourse to local identity, social meaning and language ideology. In doing so, I introduce an attention-to-self model of style. This model posits that when speakers pay greater attention-to-self, they closer approximate a desired self, a target identity that they aspire to embody. For example, when speakers subvert the standard language ideology, their stylistic target may not be ‘educated’ or ‘posh’, but ‘local’. In such cases, careful speech styles can be conducive to the production of local dialect forms as a performance of identity. I propose that the stylisation of local identity in careful speech styles in Cornwall should be interpreted in the context of an alternative linguistic market, a Cornish micro-market, which subverts the value system of the dominant linguistic market.
Research on political style suggests that where women make arguments that are more emotional, empathetic and positive, men use language that is more analytical, aggressive and complex. However, existing work does not consider how gendered patterns of style vary over time. Focusing on the UK, we argue that pressures for female politicians to conform to stereotypically ‘feminine’ styles have diminished in recent years. To test this argument, we describe novel quantitative text-analysis approaches for measuring a diverse set of styles at scale in political speech data. Analysing UK parliamentary debates between 1997 and 2019, we show that the debating styles of female MPs have changed substantially over time, as women in Parliament have increasingly adopted stylistic traits that are typically associated with ‘masculine’ stereotypes of communication. Our findings imply that prominent gender-based stereotypes of politicians' behaviour are significantly worse descriptors of empirical reality now than they were in the past.
Some writers of the Victorian period, as well as more recent critics, have argued that the prose style of Victorian fiction aims to efface itself or that an absence of style may in itself represent the nineteenth-century ideal. This collection provides a major assessment of style in Victorian fiction and demonstrates that style - the language, techniques and artistry of prose - is inseparable from meaning and that it is through the many resources of style that the full compass of meaning makes itself known. Leading scholars in the field present an engaging assessment of major Victorian novelists, illustrating how productive and illuminating close attention to literary style can be. Collectively, they build a fresh and nuanced understanding of how style functioned in the literature of the nineteenth century, and propose that the fiction of this era demands we think about what style does, as much as what style is.
Chapter 2 focuses on Cicero’s last work of rhetorical theory, the Orator, and its defense of decorum. Cicero positions the pursuit of decorous, adaptable, polyvocal speech as a political commitment: the orator ought to cultivate speech across the recognized range of styles. Cicero claims that the speech of contemporaries who refuse the challenges of decorum is not just stylistically inert but politically deficient. He advances these claims by constructing a useable stylistic past centered on the Athenian orator Demosthenes. In stressing Demosthenes’s stylistic range, Cicero draws a polemical contrast between his own brand of highly stylized speech and his contemporaries who confine themselves to plain speech. Cicero’s discussion of style also constitutes a critique of the rhetorically circumscribed world that Caesar’s preeminence promised. In such a world, the speaker-audience responsiveness that accounts for much of rhetoric’s normative value would be significantly curtailed – a loss in epistemic, political, and moral terms. In the final section, I consider more general questions about stylized speech. How could Demosthenes’s range of voices be consistent with his reputation for parrhesia, or frankness? As I argue, an embrace of stylized speech can open the way for less intuitive, but more challenging and more rewarding, forms of frankness.
When a composer refers to an early work as his ‘fountain of youth piece’, how literally should scholars take it? In the case of Thomas Adès and Philip Hensher’s chamber opera Powder Her Face (1995), I argue that the former’s turn of phrase reveals more than just fondness for a succès de scandale that later informed several instrumental adaptations. One node in a network of metaphors in Adès’s statements about his music, the ‘fountain’ image reflects his tendency to at once invoke and critique the concepts of musical surface and depth. Stylistic play and allusions to existing music constitute the Adèsian surface, organically interrelated with an ‘underground river of meaning’ – the work’s unheard yet guiding compositional and dramatic structures. I examine implications of this metaphor in Adès’s social commentary on gender, class and mortality. Camp and drag, queer performative strategies that exaggerate surface features while implying affective depth, figure prominently.
This book explores how English sentences are constructed. In this introduction, we explain our approach. We describe the current status of English as a global language, why it holds this status, and why it might not be the best choice. We characterize Standard English as a large dialect cluster, mentioning the British and American subvarieties, along with other dialects, while deploring dialect prejudice. Differences between spoken & written English, formal & informal style, and the grammarian’s purposes of describing & advising are addressed.
In the book, we introduce and define many technical terms for grammatical concepts, and here we justify some of our terminological decisions, noting that even familiar terms like noun and verb will be clearly defined, though often in ways new to the reader. We provide examples to show why.
Though many think language is about words, we focus on sentences and the discoverable constraints about how English sentences can and can’t be structured, constraints that every English speaker recognizes. The most interesting thing about grammar is that these constraints aren’t stipulated rules. They can be discovered through investigation.
Adam Roberts identifies the opposition between plain and excessive styles as a distinguishing feature in the history of science fiction. The chapter considers the rival origins of the genre in Verne and Wells and offers a comprehensive survey of twentieth- and twenty-first-century traditions. Roberts tracks the history of a pared-down, plain style that often runs counter to the excess and scientific detail of the content and sets it alongside a competing, more ambitious, ‘literary’ prose style that has increasingly come into the ascendancy.
Michael D. Hurley’s chapter considers the many applications of the concept of style and pursues its historical fortunes across a range of writers. Although style has been variously configured and refigured, what is apparent is that the ideal of clarity, so frequently promoted by style guides and other textbooks, is not the only objective of style, especially not in literary fiction and non-fiction.
The introduction outlines the kind of attention to prose techniques that forms the basis for the chapters that follow. It claims that prose is all too infrequently granted this kind of attention. In part, this is because of the claims to ordinariness that prose writing often proposes for itself, where prose comes to seem either prosaic or prosy. Critical and philosophical traditions have reinforced the view that prose is at its best when it effaces itself, when it conceals its own wording. But this principle has tended to distract from the craft of prose. The introduction outlines the parts of prose (punctuation, words, sentences, and so on) and the various genres (realism, comedy, Gothic, science fiction, and creative non-fiction) that subsequent chapters take up for inspection as regards the techniques of prose themselves.
The first chapter gives a general overview of Lysias’ work and explains some of the difficult aspects about his scholarship. We will look at the corpus Lysiacum, discuss issues of authenticity and establish Lysias as a writer with very broad interests and skills.
This Companion provides an introduction to the craft of prose. It considers the technical aspects of style that contribute to the art of prose, examining the constituent parts of prose through a widening lens, from the smallest details of punctuation and wording to style more broadly conceived. The book is concerned not only with prose fiction but with creative non-fiction, a growing area of interest for readers and aspiring writers. Written by internationally-renowned critics, novelists and biographers, the essays provide readers and writers with ways of understanding the workings of prose. They are exemplary of good critical practice, pleasurable reading for their own sake, and both informative and inspirational for practising writers. The Cambridge Companion to Prose will serve as a key resource for students of English literature and of creative writing.
This book explores the history of rhetorical thought and examines the gradual association of different aspects of rhetorical theory with two outstanding fourth-century BCE writers: Lysias and Isocrates. It highlights the parallel development of the rhetorical tradition that became understood, on the one hand, as a domain of style and persuasive speech, associated with the figure of Lysias, and, on the other, as a kind of philosophical enterprise which makes significant demands on moral and political education in antiquity, epitomized in the work of Isocrates. There are two pivotal moments in which the two rhetoricians were pitted against each other as representatives of different modes of cultural discourse: Athens in the fourth century BCE, as memorably portrayed in Plato's Phaedrus, and Rome in the first century BCE when Dionysius of Halicarnassus proposes to create from the united Lysianic and Isocratean rhetoric the foundation for the ancient rhetorical tradition. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Both lauded and criticized for his pictorial eclecticism, the Florentine artist Jacopo Carrucci, known as Pontormo, created some of the most visually striking religious images of the Renaissance. These paintings, which challenged prevailing illusionistic conventions, mark a unique contribution into the complex relationship between artistic innovation and Christian traditions in the first half of the sixteenth century. Pontormo's sacred works are generally interpreted as objects that reflect either pure aesthetic experimentation, or personal and cultural anxiety. Jessica Maratsos, however, argues that Pontormo employed stylistic change deliberately for novel devotional purposes. As a painter, he was interested in the various modes of expression and communication - direct address, tactile evocation, affective incitement - as deployed in a wide spectrum of devotional culture, from sacri monti, to Michelangelo's marble sculptures, to evangelical lectures delivered at the Accademia Fiorentina. Maratsos shows how Pontormo translated these modes in ways that prompt a critical rethinking of Renaissance devotional art.