Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain is an original and innovative study of the stylistic tics of canonical novelists including Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray and Eliot. Jonathan Farina shows how ordinary locutions such as 'a decided turn', 'as if' and 'that sort of thing' condense nineteenth-century manners, tacit aesthetics and assumptions about what counts as knowledge. Writers recognized these recurrent 'everyday words' as signatures of 'character'. Attending to them reveals how many of the fundamental forms of characterizing fictional characters also turn out to be forms of characterizing objects, natural phenomena and inanimate, abstract things, such as physical laws, the economy and legal practice. Ultimately, this book revises what 'character' meant to nineteenth-century Britons by respecting the overlapping, transdisciplinary connotations of the category.

Reviews & endorsements

'Only in learning from Farina himself have I become more sensitized to the luminosity that inheres in the vernacular. Indeed, if we follow Farina along his chosen, if surprising path, we will enjoy the rewards of discovery - about character, the novel, and realism, about written worlds and the social existences we all inhabit. … [This book] has sharpened my awareness of how we use language with one another, even in my own everyday life.' Barabara Black, Review 19

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Product details

• Date Published: February 2019
• format: Paperback
• isbn: 9781316632789
• length: 316 pages

• dimensions: 230 x 152 x 17 mm
• weight: 0.45kg
• availability: Available