Throughout his writing life, Anthony Trollope denied that his style, or any writer’s style, was worthy of much notice.  Despite the much-vaunted plainness of Trollope’s prose, this chapter shows that his style, apparently designed to erase itself, becomes the means of involving readers as active participants in unstable processes of moral and political adjudication. Building on recent accounts that have considered the ethics of prose style, the chapter suggests that Trollope’s style fosters a degree of moral ambivalence. His style is influenced by the idea of gentlemanly ease and is at the same time brought into rivalry with the professional lawyer. Although in novels such as Orley Farm (1861) Trollope (unreasonably) railed against lawyers willing to give a good defence to scoundrels, his own ‘elusive style’ is not as strident in judgement as such invective might lead us to expect.

Nicola Bradbury’s chapter on Henry James notices the force that comes from simple diction even as it expresses subtle, complicated thoughts, feelings and occasions in The Wings of the Dove (1902) and What Maisie Knew (1897). At times in these novels, a bold, clear style plays against the more verbose, analytical style we expect from late James. A style such as this repeatedly gestures towards an apprehension that is not fully expressed, something that goes behind and beyond the immediate statement. Here, style is measured at the level of the sentence and it is shown to comprise of a range of devices including alliteration, assonance, diction, syntax, rhythm, and cadence.

Context, plot, character and theme have dominated modern critical understandings of Wilkie Collins’s fiction, and there are relatively few discussions of his idiom, tone or voice. Collins himself seems to have encouraged this approach to his work, and repeatedly downgraded the question of literary style. But the topic takes us to the heart of his work, and helps us both to understand the nature and quality of his achievement and to see the relationship within it between questions of language and signification and those of identity and the sense of self.  Collins is fascinated in many of his fictions by what it means to have a troubled, false or non-existent identity, to have bodies and sensations that are not properly one’s own; the most revelatory texts and inscriptions in his work are often anonymous or unstylised. This chapter is about how Collins’s work explores and exposes the vulnerability of style, as it stages style’s appearances and disappearances.

Rounding out the previous chapter’s treatment of Victorian narrative with the early modernist prose of Henry James, analysis returns to the ontology of language in Agamben, leading on to a more philologically oriented history of prose – pivoted on the Enlightenment rise of the “plain style” – in research by John Guillory. Such is a mode of discourse whose potential stranglehold on future developments in literary writing is contrasted with a recovered premium on the densities of rhythm and sonority. Literary examples extend from Whitman’s insurgent lexical poetics, through D. H. Lawrence’s grammatically impacted style, to the stripped-down phrasal ironies of Kazuo Ishiguro – before returning to Friedrich Kittler on the ideologies of speech as medium in the post-Enlightenment century. Discussion closes with an adapted Heideggerian model for the present-at-handness of language itself in medial disclosure – rather than just in scriptive use.

Chapter Three explores a series of polemical adaptations to the long poem A Lytell Geste how the Ploughman Learned his Pater Noster (1510), arguing that the figure of the simple English countryman came to embody national tradition. First emerging in the Tudor rediscovery of the reformist ploughman and the poetics of Protestant plainness, Luke Shepherd’s John Bon and Mast Parson (1548) reflects an understanding of the common man as naturally Protestant.During the second half of the sixteenth century this figure became assimilated to a recusant aesthetic, first as comedy in Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1552) Respublica (1553) and William Stevenson’s Gammer Gurton’s Needle (c. 1553), and then tragically in John Heywood’s Pater Noster poems (c. 1550) and Thomas Deloney’s ‘A pleasant Dialogue betweene plaine Truth, and blind Ignorance’ (c. 1588). Both discourses, however, shared an understanding of the common man as an embodiment of English tradition and as a therefore a source of political and theological legitimacy.