Novel Style

Ethics and Excess in English Fiction Since the 1960s
Erscheinungsjahr 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-876614-8
Verlag: Oxford University Press(UK)

Buch, Englisch, 214 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 490 g

We live in a time of linguistic plainness. This is the age of the tweet and the internet meme; the soundbite, the status, the slogan. Everything reduced to its most basic components. Stripped back. Pared down. 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. There is a prevailing minimalist sensibility in the twenty-first century.

Novel Style is driven by the conviction that elaborate writing opens up unique ways of thinking that are endangered when expression is reduced to its leanest possible forms. By re-examining the works of essential English stylists of the late twentieth century (Anthony Burgess, Angela Carter, Martin Amis), as well as a newer generation of twenty-first-century stylists (Zadie Smith, Nicola Barker, David Mitchell), 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. A passionate championing of elaborate writing and close reading, Novel Style illuminates what it means to have style and how style can change us.
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Autoren/Hrsg.

Masters, Ben

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Prosa, Erzählung, Roman, Prosaautoren
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Ästhetik
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Ethik, Moralphilosophie

Über Autor(innen)

Ben Masters is a novelist, critic, and Assistant Professor in English Literature, 1880 to the present, at the University of Nottingham. His first novel, Noughties, was published in 2012, and he has written for The Times Literary Supplement, Guardian, New York Times, and Five Dials, amongst other publications.