Patter comprises virtuosic comic speech and song that test the limits of legibility. Patter was used by several of deadpan’s early practitioners, and both patter and deadpan involve misdirection. By examining patter songs and jokes by English, Australian, and American comedians who specialized in the form, this chapter extends the book’s investigation of content’s role in discussions of style. It discusses four examples that span the historical period covered by this book: English comedian Charles James Matthews’ 1838 one-act farce Patter Versus Clatter, in which Matthews played four roles; the “matter patter” trio from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore (1887); Australian patter comedians Vaude and Verne’s topical newspaper jokes and war songs during the 1910s; and American vaudevillians Al Shaw and Sam Lee’s Vitaphone short, The Beau Brummels (1928). In so doing, the chapter reflects on deadpan’s relationship to tone, timing and attention, and intelligibility.

‘John McGahern’s Fictions’ traces the development of John McGahern as a writer from his first published novel, The Barracks (1963), through to his final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002), drawing on correspondence and other archival sources to make the argument that throughout his life McGahern wondered if his works were actually novels at all, preferring to think of them as ‘religious poems’. It is demonstrated that McGahern’s novels are not primarily concerned with narrative, nor even with character, but with style. His own favoured reading, including Proust and Rilke, tended in this direction; and this explains the ability of McGahern’s writing to endow non-human objects, including the landscape, with a kind of sentience. Ultimately, it is argued that the cornerstone of McGahern’s literary aesthetic is ‘the image’, and his novels need to be read as revolving around the creation of images.

This chapter contextualizes Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār’s largely overlooked writings in early twentieth-century periodicals that forged the critical vocabulary for an emerging literary discipline called adabiyāt. It shows how adabiyāt’s institutionalization in the 1930s and 1940s was marked by the erasure of its semantic multiplicity, rendering it a singular and standalone concept. This erasure is the last step in the mythologization of Persian literature as a historical construct. The realignment of adabiyāt as literature entailed discussions and debates about the role of language and literature in a nationalizing society where intellectuals such as Bahār were being socialized in a new national reality. Linking these individuals and conversations were voluntary and state-funded associations or anjomans, which laid the foundation for a modern discourse of literature in late Qajar and early Pahlavi Iran. The chapter argues that if scholars, students, and admirers of Persian literature are to create more socially responsible and inclusive ways of celebrating and understanding Persian literary works, we cannot afford to romanticize its pasts.

Using examples from Bishop’s letters and diaries, as well as more recent theoretical accounts, the introduction explores various meanings of the word ‘style’ and their pertinence to Bishop’s work. The introduction highlights the predominance of biographical criticism in works on Bishop (and other twentieth-century writers) and instead argues for the importance of stylistic criticism. This chapter goes on to delineate two broader trends in contemporary literary criticism – historicist on the one hand, formalist on the other – and outlines their shortcomings in understanding the nuances of particular poems and literary works. The chapter then outlines this book’s focus on several aspects of style across Bishop’s entire oeuvre, including cliché, simile, allusion, and correctio. The introduction ends by arguing that aesthetic evaluation and judgement are central to the responsible and rigorous practice of literary criticism.

Martin Amis’s prose style has been profoundly influential, and so has the consistency with which he foregrounded questions of style in his fiction and non-fiction. This chapter discusses what Amis meant when he spoke about style. It also discusses what it might be possible to say about style as such and argues that we can only really argue about a given style. It goes on to anatomise Martin Amis’s prose style using the tools of close reading, quoting from his novels Money and Time’s Arrow as well as his memoir Experience and his short story ‘The Coincidence of the Arts’. It discusses Amis’s style as a hybrid of postmodern and liberal-humanist insights into the nature of the world; as essentially urban; as positing style as a dandified response to British post-imperial decline; and, finally, as intrinsically comic.

This chapter introduces the key issues raised by the poetry of Hipponax. After assessing the available data on his life – his date, place of origin, and the implications of his name – we examine three life stories told by ancient sources, which potentially illustrate ancient receptions of his ‘autobiographical’ poetry. Then we enter the world of Hipponax’s poetry by discussing his reported feud with the sculptor Boupalos and the other characters, places, and objects that populate it. We sketch a novel approach to the question of its fictionality, while also paying due attention to the other interesting questions posed by the corpus. We conclude by looking at some elements of Hipponax’s poetic language: his play with ‘foreign’ words, his fondness for bizarre compounds, his use of similes, his reception of epic, and his uniquely creative use of metre.

This chapter addresses the issue of linguistic and structural experimentation in Time’s Arrow and Night Train. Going beyond the apparent differences between the two novels (reflected in the criticism devoted to them), it demonstrates that they are characterised by an experimental vein relying on the same pillars, that is, stylistic virtuosity, narrative inversion, and doubling. It argues in favour of Amis’s use of experimental gestures as geared to the experiential manifestation of a distinctive narrative ethics.

Chapter 1 delineates the overlapping new paradigms of persuasion elaborated by Thomas De Quincey and William Hazlitt in response to George Campbell and David Hume, and considers their implications for the genre of the periodical essay. Against Campbell’s definition of persuasion as an emotional supplement to rational conviction, De Quincey and Hazlitt, in their essays of the 1820s and 1830s, formulate the alternative of a self-consciously partial and flexible way of holding and forming beliefs. De Quincey’s performance of such persuasion in “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” makes apparent the problem of anything-goes judgment that leads him, in his “Rhetoric” and “Style” essays, to restrict persuasion to “subjective” domains like rhetoric and poetry. Hazlitt, by contrast, in his late-career essays on belief, opinion, and controversy, endorses malleable persuasion in all domains of dispute and theorizes its unique affinity with imaginative literature.

This chapter yokes sartorial fashion and the literary trends that cultural colossus Rabindranath Tagore shapes and critiques in the early twentieth century. Bringing the figure of the dandy to a global stage in his late novel Shesher Kobita or Farewell Song (also translated as The Last Poem, 1928), Tagore lightly cloaks a manifesto on self-fashioning, modernist literary form, and the power of style. Farewell Song not only draws upon the history of textiles in Bengal, but also occasions a contest of fashions between British and Bengali forms of dress. The ensuing debate between Fashion and Style speaks across aesthetic fields and serves to highlight India’s rightful place on the modernist literary stage.

This chapter provides you with some guidelines on how to write a paper that conveys your findings in an attractive, easily readable, and convincing way. We have divided the guidelines into four parts: Part 1 explains how to present your content in a way that is compelling and convincing. Part 2 deals with style issues. Part 3 deals with language and grammar issues. Finally, Part 4 deals with commonly misused words.

This chapter discusses the dazzling array of creativity that is language and metaphor in Pindar, in terms of its impact on us as its consumers and in terms of the questions that aspects of lyric diction and style ask of us. The discussion reaffirms the importance of close reading from the inside out as the key to appreciating the nature and challenge of Pindaric lyric. It assesses the powers and risks that come with lyric language in detail and across time, as readers and audiences are stopped in their tracks. The chapter discusses the experiential potential of a representative selection of examples taken from across the corpus, in three sections. Section 1, ‘Options’, investigates how Pindaric lyric fosters both a freedom of expression and an encouragement to audiences and readers to keep their minds open in response. Section 2, ‘Colours of Desire’, explores the sustained intensificatory effects of marked imagery in one extended example from Olympian 6. Section 3, ‘Access and Appropriateness’, explores how the hyperbolic nature of lyric imagery may raise further questions about our commitments to the sentiments that Pindaric lyric finds itself able to project.

The idea of social class is complicated by the multidimensional nature of culture. North American sociolinguistics began the quantitative turn in the study of language variation. Labov used a number of classes and styles to observe linguistic variation in cities. Every social group has its own characteristics of speech, as predicted by the complex systems model, and groups follow the logic of scale dependency. Sociolinguistic study can be improved by complexity science.

Emerson’s poetry has been somewhat of an enigma for readers and critics alike, who have often found it thematically opaque and stylistically unwieldy. Many have concluded that he was incapable of writing “better” verse, a conclusion predicated upon the assumption that he intended to do otherwise but couldn’t. This essay takes as a starting point the idea that the roughness of Emerson’s poetic style was intentional and that his metric irregularities are not accidents. After analyzing the style, rhetoric, and prosody of the poems, this essay contextualizes these elements within Emerson’s metaphysics. It argues that Emerson’s poetry reveals the crumbling of meter that led to the modernist revolution and free verse; poetic style did not suddenly jump from Longfellow to Whitman, but rather meter was stretched and strained before it was broken.

Before his rehabilitation got under way in the late 1970s, had Emerson really been the object of “repression” by the American philosophical establishment? The validity of the historical claim put forward by Stanley Cavell has always seemed doubtful. In point of fact, Emerson turns out to have, from his day to ours, a largely unbroken chain of legitimate heirs among American philosophers. This chapter, which builds on previous scholarly efforts to correct and complete the record, notably by historians of pragmatism, continues the work of recovering the Emersonian legacy in American philosophy. The multiform nature of that legacy, which extends to pedagogical theory and classroom practice in American schools, raises important questions for historiographers as they deal with changes in cultural and institutional reception over time. Of particular importance is the question raised by Cavell’s own contribution to Emerson studies: what is philosophy’s relation to the broader literary culture?

Upon her death in 1973, obituary tributes praised Bowen’s output, without committing to calling her a major writer. Male obituarists cast her a comic writer who supported other writers, without herself being gifted with genius. Yet Bowen’s legacy has grown in the past several decades. John Banville has woven some of Bowen’s themes into his novels – the dilemma of the Anglo-Irish during the Second World War in The Paying Guests and a short radio play called ‘Bowen and Betjeman’ – and Bowen makes a cameo appearance in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Bowen’s love affair with Charles Ritchie provides the substance of Eibhear Walshe’s novel The Last Day at Bowen’s Court. Yet Bowen’s influence is even more discernible in essays and memoirs by Eavan Boland, Molly Keane, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, and A. S. Byatt. As time passes, her relevance increases, and the contexts in which she wrote continue to widen.

Although Elizabeth Bowen is primarily known for her work as a novelist throughout her long career, her prose frequently resembles poetry. She often borrows elements from verse to enhance her fiction. Notably, the three-part greater romantic lyric has an influence on The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart in its plying together of past and present, as well as different locations. In her lectures, radio broadcasts, and literary criticism, Bowen was fond of illustrating the craft of fiction with examples from verse. Not only was she an avid reader and reviewer of contemporary poets such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, and May Sarton, but she was also a close friend of many of them. Whenever her work was compared to poetry, she took it as the highest compliment. This essay explores her intertwined connections, both in her language and in her life, to the poets and poetry that surrounded her.

In this chapter, we delve deeper into the realm of stories, or narratives. This endeavor is particularly worthwhile if we acknowledge that our knowledge of the world is largely shaped by narratives. We discuss several functions of narrative which are relevant to our study of sustainability leadership, in and through governance. Narratives create meaning, they define problems, solution and methods and they connect values, feelings and ideas. Even more fundamentally, narratives create community, which involves patterns of openness and closure, of inclusion and exclusion. We develop a succinct theory of interpretation to extend our understanding of stories and their roles in governance and community, with special emphasis on the concepts of genre, audience and medium, the structuring of time through stories and the position of stories that select other stories and keep them in place: master narratives.