Chapter 1 - On Style: An Introduction

Summary

Style is notoriously difficult to define; there are many different literary styles and many different ways of understanding style. This chapter discusses several of these possibilities and suggests that the work of style will be best understood by close attention to the multiple technical resources that constitute any style. This kind of attention will show that style is not separate to meaning, not merely an adornment or accessory to it, for style is inseparable from expression. In particular, it is style that generates meaning and implication, over and above the apparently paraphraseable sense. Although some Victorian novelists stated that the ideal style effaced its own presence, Victorian novels are more aware of their verbal artistry, and indeed their artifice, than some critics allow or than the ideal of transparency permits. Such a self-understanding is helpfully writ large in novels that dramatize a writer’s development of their literary style, including George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways, Charlotte Bronte’s Villette and Thomas Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta.