Novel style : ethics and excess in English fiction since the 1960s / Ben Masters.

Novel style : ethics and excess in English fiction since the 1960s / Ben Masters.

First edition.

9780191820731 (electronic book)

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2017.

English

1 online resource

PR478.S78

820.900914

This is the age of the tweet and the internet meme; the soundbite, the status, the slogan. Everything reduced to its most basic components. Even in the world of literature, where we might hope to find some linguistic luxury, we are flirting with a recessionary mood. Big books abound, but rhetorical largesse at the level of the sentence is a shrinking economy. This book is driven by a conviction that elaborate writing opens up unique ways of thinking; crucial and enriching ways that are endangered when expression is reduced to its leanest possible forms. By re-examining the works of essential English stylists of the late 20th century, as well as a newer generation of 21st-century stylists, Ben Masters argues for the ethical power of stylistic flamboyance in fiction and demonstrates how being a stylist and an ethicist are one and the same thing.

This is the age of the tweet and the internet meme; the soundbite, the status, the slogan. Everything reduced to its most basic components. Even in the world of literature, where we might hope to find some linguistic luxury, we are flirting with a recessionary mood. Big books abound, but rhetorical largesse at the level of the sentence is a shrinking economy. This book is driven by a conviction that elaborate writing opens up unique ways of thinking; crucial and enriching ways that are endangered when expression is reduced to its leanest possible forms. By re-examining the works of essential English stylists of the late 20th century, as well as a newer generation of 21st-century stylists, Ben Masters argues for the ethical power of stylistic flamboyance in fiction and demonstrates how being a stylist and an ethicist are one and the same thing.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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Description based on online resource; title from home page (viewed on November 7, 2017).

Print version: 9780198766148

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