Thinking Through Style Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century

What is 'style', and how does it relate to thought in language? It has often been treated as something merely linguistic, independent of thought, ornamental; stylishness for its own sake. Or else it has been said to subserve thought, by mimicking, delineating, or heightening ideas that are already expressed in the words. This ambitious and timely book explores a third, more radical possibility in which style operates as a verbal mode of thinking through. Rather than figure thought as primary and pre-verbal, and language as a secondary delivery system, style is conceived here as having the capacity to clarify or generate thinking. The book's generic focus is on non-fiction prose, and it looks across the long nineteenth century.

Leading scholars survey twenty authors to show where writers who have gained reputations as either 'stylists' or as 'thinkers' exploit the interplay between 'the what' and 'the how' of their prose. The study demonstrates how celebrated stylists might, after all, have thoughts worth attending to, and that distinguished thinkers might be enriched for us if we paid more due to their style. More than reversing the conventional categories, this innovative volume shows how 'style' and 'thinking' can be approached as a shared concern. At a moment when, especially in nineteenth-century studies, interest in style is re-emerging, this book revaluates some of the most influential figures of that age, re-imagining the possible alliances, interplays, and generative tensions between thinking, thinkers, style, and stylists.

Michael D. Hurley, University Lecturer and Fellow in English, St Catharine's College, University of Cambridge,Marcus Waithe, University Senior Lecturer, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge

Michael D. Hurley teaches English at the University of Cambridge, where he is a University Lecturer and a Fellow of St Catharine's College. He has written widely on literary style and its relationship with feeling and thinking. His books include Faith Poetry: Verse Style as a Mode of Religious Belief (Bloomsbury, 2017), G. K. Chesterton (Northcote House, 2012), and (co-authored with Michael O'Neill) Poetic Form (CUP, 2012).

Marcus Waithe is a Fellow in English and University Senior Lecturer at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is the author of William Morris's Utopia of Strangers: William Morris and the Ideal of Hospitality (2006), and of numerous essays and articles on Victorian and twentieth-century topics. A collection of essays, co-edited with Claire White, entitled The Labour Literature in Britain and France, 1830-1930: Authorial Work Ethics is forthcoming with Palgrave. He is also completing a monograph entitled The Work of Words: Literature and the Labour of Mind in Britain, 1830-1930.

Introduction: Thinking, Thinkers, Style, Stylists, Michael D. Hurley and Marcus Waithe
1. 'A Hare in Every Nettle': Coleridge's Prose, James Engell
2. Charles Lamb . . . Seriously, Matthew Bevis
3. Keeping to William Hazlitt, Freya Johnston
4. 'Pictures' and 'Signs': Creative Thinking in Shelley's Prose, 1816-1821, Michael O'Neill
5. 'The greatest irregular': Thomas Carlyle's Re-Creative Purpose in The French Revolution, Ruth Scurr
6. John Henry Newman, Thinking Out Into Language, Michael D. Hurley
7. 'Things Pressing to be said': Harriet Martineau's Mission to Inform, Valerie Sanders
8. Emerson and the Impossibilities of Style, Adam Phillips
9. Darwin's Theological Virtues, James Williams
10. 'Just Proportions': The Material of George Eliot's Writing, Dinah Birch
11. Ruskin's Style of Thought: Animating Re-description in the Late Writings, Marcus Waithe
12. The Idea of Matthew Arnold, David Russell
13. Walter Pater's Dream Rhythms, Angela Leighton
14. Cashing In on William James, Philip Davis
15. Touch-and-go with Robert Louis Stevenson, Adrian Poole
16. Oscar Wilde: Thinking Style, Hugh Haughton
17. Vernon Lee's Handling of Words, Catherine Maxwell
18. Chesterton and the Superman: Chesterton's Levitations, Simon Jarvis
19. Virginia Woolf: Writing and the Ordinary Mind, Susan Sellers
20. Vexing the thoughtless: T.S. Eliot's early criticism, Stefan Collini