Description
Book SynopsisThis book demonstrates the significance of prose analysis by evaluating the writings of dozens of authors, including Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Don DeLillo, and Toni Morrison. This book will be a key resource for students studying fiction and the novel as well as those in creative writing, prose style and creative non-fiction courses.
Trade Review'Written in an exacting, witty and distinctive prose style of its own, this book is both a manifesto for reading for style and a first-rate demonstration of it, by a scholar-critic long known for practicing exactly the kind of critical attention called for and modelled here. Given a returning interest in prose poetics, this seems like the right book by the right critic at the right time.' Daniel Tyler, University of Cambridge
'The Value of Style in Fiction ... offers itself to those seeking to learn the craft of attentive reading and inventive writing at the level of the sentence as a form of mini-plot.' Philip Davis, Victorian Studies
Table of Contents1. Introduction: verbal investments – richness, wealth, value; 2. Emergent turns: Defoe toward Dickens; 3. Stylistic microplots: Melville to Miéville; 4. A rhetorical spectrum: Wharton, Woolf, Waugh, Wallace, and beyond; 5. Inventory: some terms of engagement – A to Z.
