The Value of Style in Fiction

Garrett Stewart is the James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa. After numerous books on fiction, poetics, film, and conceptual art, his study of Victorian narrative style, Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction, was awarded the 2011 Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative. He is the author most recently of The Deed of Reading: Literature • Writing • Language • Philosophy (2015) and Transmedium: Conceptualism 2.0 and the New Object Art (forthcoming), with a forthcoming volume on the language of Dickens entitled The One, Other, and Only Dickens. He was elected in 2010 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

'Written in an exacting, witty and distinctive prose style of its own, this book is both a manifesto for reading for style and a first-rate demonstration of it, by a scholar-critic long known for practicing exactly the kind of critical attention called for and modelled here. Given a returning interest in prose poetics, this seems like the right book by the right critic at the right time.' Daniel Tyler, University of Cambridge

• 1. Introduction: verbal investments – richness, wealth, value; 2. Emergent turns: Defoe toward Dickens; 3. Stylistic microplots: Melville to Miéville; 4. A rhetorical spectrum: Wharton, Woolf, Waugh, Wallace, and beyond; 5. Inventory: some terms of engagement – A to Z.