Afterword - Stylistic Virtue and Literary Value

Summary

The conceptual framework that accompanies stylistic virtue was the product of over two thousand years of rhetorical, critical, and philosophical development, much of which appears to collapse in the first decades of the twentieth century. However, the Afterword suggests that stylistic virtue persisted in constituent and strategically obscured forms: for example, in T.S. Eliot’s analysis of stylistic “impersonality” and I.A. Richards’s conception of the poem as “pseudo-statement.” The Afterword goes on to claim that contemporary virtue theory provides a promising avenue for the continued defense of style, and of aesthetic value more generally, as an ethical good, offering an innovative way of defending the humanities at a moment of contemporary crisis.