The forms of style: Victorian storytelling and the rise of the stylist
Creators: name: Harris, Lech M.
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2020

description: The Forms of Style links two key literary trends that unfolded in Britain between the 1850s and ‘90s: the rejection of the chatty, rhetorical author in novelistic theory and practice; and a new critical enthusiasm for theorizations of prose style. What was emerging in these decades, I argue, was a new concept of style: one in which the intimate details of composition disclose the individual trace of an unseen author. This new model was understood to be incompatible with a previous notion of style, conceived under the sign of rhetoric, wherein the author is directly available as a speaking presence in the text, hailing the reader from the page. In this way, the effacement of the loquacious, rhetorical author as a Victorian novelistic convention was an essential prerequisite for the emergence of the modern idea of style that we still hold today.Recognizing these two trends allows us to properly historicize the understanding of style that we’ve inherited from modernism. I argue that the emergence of a modernist commitment to style did not come about as suddenly as we often assume, in some definitive break with chatty Victorian storytelling—rather, it unfolded gradually over the course of a 50-year span, a long period in which rhetoric and style were not fully extricated from each other or even fully defined. By extending this negotiation between the immediacy of a vocal presence and the abstraction of textual construction into the very heart of the Victorian period, we are recognizing not only its centrality to the Victorian novel, but also the fact that the shift from rhetoric to style was much more a story of continuity than of any kind of decisive break. Indeed, I argue that style, in truth, did not vanquish or replace rhetoric—rather, rhetoric became style: the markers of oral immediacy, of a direct speaking presence, were repurposed into the telling details of style. Understanding style in fiction as a concept with a history—that is to say, recognizing in ‘style’ a literary term that does not designate a historically constant idea, but rather an idea that has been reinterpreted through successive dispensations—is also to recognize, I argue, the inextricability of style’s history from the history of narrative forms: it implies that what we mean by ‘style’ has evolved in dialogue with the changing fashions of novelistic technique and the arrival of new modes of narration and representation. The question of how to identify the transitional forms, the types of stories in which one can see rhetoric becoming style, is the question that animates the readings of the Victorian novel that comprise this dissertation. In this project, I argue that many of the best-known and most influential narrative forms of the period—from Dickensian caricature, to melodramatic tableau, to the “whodunit,” to the frame tale—share a status of being interestingly poised between rhetorical address and stylistic diffusion, between an intimate author who meets the reader’s gaze directly and one who is detectable only in the purposeful construction of the text: and in fact reveal the former becoming the latter, the gestures of authorial presence beginning to function as the signs of style. Finally, one of the motivating commitments of this dissertation is to read the novel as an art that was not evolving in a vacuum, but rather developing in mutual dialogue with other literary arts: a perspective that is especially necessary when tracking the passage of the Victorian novel from rhetoric to style, as the aesthetic changes that the novel was undergoing during this period often looked to other arts, like the drama, for their theory or justification. Ideas about theater and theatricality were central to the debates over novelistic rhetoric that began in the middle of the century—and novelists, too, looked to the theater and its forms in their efforts to imagine a post-rhetorical narrative discourse. Theater, however, was hardly alone in playing this kind of supporting role: for in the 1880s, the rapid rise of the modern short story in Britain—carrying with it an aesthetic of brevity, of elliptical suggestiveness and signifying moments, which was seen to be antithetical to the loose and baggy discursivity of the rhetorical novel—introduced another influential model for a novel in a state of aesthetic transition, as well as a convenient venue for authors of fiction to experiment with new kinds of narratives. The theater and the short story were each mobilized as metaphors for a new model of style at successive points in the latter half of the nineteenth century, providing a heuristic for the rhetorical novel to reimagine itself as the product of a stylist.