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.

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.

This introduction offers an overview of the volume’s variety of literary critical approaches to reading William James, and its account of James’s equally various approaches to literature. We draw out some of the generative through-lines among these approaches and spell out some of their broader implications for how we read, teach, and respond to literature. In outlining the three sections of the book – Style, Influence, and Method – we show how James historically informs and prospectively transforms the way we think about the bedrock premises of literary study. As we contend, the persistent richness of James’s work and the ongoing relevance of literary study itself are rooted in similar commitments: For both, any critical investigation must synchronously value expression, edification, and application. Our volume foregrounds these stakes – the aesthetic, the transmissive, the practical – because together they comprise an ideal bridge between James and literary study, a mutual paradigm that we contend is fundamentally pedagogical in nature.

Sir Thomas Malory’s late fiftenth-century prose work Le Morte Darthur is the most substantial Middle English account of the legendary king, and has strongly influenced later Arthurian writers, including Tennyson, Twain and T. H. White. We know little about  Malory and his reasons for writing (in prison); was it a commission? The Morte was printed by William Caxton, the first English printer, and frequently reprinted, but only one manuscript copy survives. I discuss Malory’s adaptation of the familiar story, using a remarkable range of sources in several languages. He gives surprising prominence to Lancelot, not a popular figure in the English tradition, and chooses to include the Grail Quest, in which most knights fail. I consider Malory’s deceptively plain style, his values, his attitudes to women, and also his historical context; he fought in the Wars of the Roses, so Arthur’s rise and fall must have had particular significance for him.

Chapter 1 begins with an overview of Neo-Latin as a scientific language. By the mid-fifteenth century, Latin had been the Western European lingua franca of science and learning for more than a millennium. However, the stylistic preferences of humanist authors, who tried to imitate classical texts, especially their vocabulary, presented a challenge in many areas, but above all in the sciences, where a new-found wealth of knowledge required an equal number of new names. Important debates on how far nonclassical words were to be tolerated and the hierarchy of res and verba are also analysed in this chapter.

In this chapter, Jane Thrailkill aligns the instructive aims and literary effects of Jamesian style to underline the broader pedagogical purpose of literary criticism. Her reading of The Principles of Psychology analyzes what she describes as James’s “troping devices,” special literary tools intended to catalyze in his audience a process of “experiential, tactile, sensory education.” In this key early work, Thrailkill argues, James’s stylistic play seeks to “capture the mind in action” – to make the text itself into the kind of experience from which we learn, rather than a static description of that experience. As this essay establishes, James’s experiments in thinking and writing are everywhere motivated by his commitment to pedagogy, combined with his knowledge of how learning actually occurs.

A detailed commentary which covers matters of literary and historical interest in book VII in the context of Herodotos’ History as a whole. Issues treated include style, dialect, language, text (where necessary), political, religious and social history, both Greek and Persian, prosopography, ethnicity and geography.

Different texts have different characteristics. In this chapter, we first explore the concepts of register, genre and style, which are, in the tradition of Biber, linked to communicative functions and situational characteristics. The co-occurrence of register features and dimensions are introduced as the linguistic indicators of communicative functions. A particularly useful approach to register centres around keyness, which we demonstrate with historical Portuguese data. We then introduce discourse traditions as a historical-linguistic concept closely related to genre and register. We use French literary examples to explain stylistic differences and the link with the Labovian distinction between indicators, markers and stereotypes. This leads to a discussion of indexicality and indexical fields more generally, for which we draw on ancient Greek plays. The chapter continues the discussion of the literary representation of language variation on the basis of English texts comprising dialect, and explains the important concept of enregisterment.