On Style in Victorian Fiction

Suited to students and scholars alike, On Style in Victorian Fiction provides a timely and passionate argument for attending to the style of Victorian fiction as inseparable from meaning. Including a broad scope of major novelists from this period, the volume is indispensable for anyone working on Victorian literature.

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.