Acknowledgments; List of Illustrations; Introduction: What Is Stylistic Virtue?; 1. Stylistic Virtue and the Rise of Literary Formalism; 2. Stylistic Virtue between Moralism and Aestheticism; 3. Virtue Theory and the Nature of the Aesthetic; 4. Thackeray's Grace; 5. Trollope's Ease and Lucidity; 6. Meredith's Fervidness; Afterword: Stylistic Virtue and Literary Value; Bibliography; Index.
Offers a deep history of style in theory and practice that transforms our understanding of style in the novel.
Matthew Sussman is a lecturer in the Department of English at the The University of Sydney.
'Matthew Sussman offers an eye-opening account of style in the
nineteenth century … wonderful, and rigorous … It is one of the
rare books that has helped me understand much better a
term—'style'—I use every day. It is a book to be grateful for.'
Jesse Rosenthal, Nineteenth-Century Contexts
'Matthew Sussman fascinatingly connects two concepts that today's
reader would be more likely to oppose: style and virtue. Sussman's
striking claim in the book is that the verbal qualities of a text,
even when considered separately from the text's content, can have
ethical or moral value … One of its invaluable contributions to the
field is to situate Victorian fiction in a long history of
rhetorical criticism that takes Aristotle's Art of
Rhetoric as its source of inspiration. In chapters that are
both philosophically robust and painstakingly researched, Sussman
establishes how stylistic virtues resemble moral virtues in
providing a characterological ideal.' Judging Panel, 2021 AUHE
Prize for Literary Scholarship
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