This chapter examines the opposition between, on the one hand, an approach to diction as the index of broader poetic, historical, and social formations (e.g., genre, period, and class) and, on the other hand, an approach to diction as the expression of an individual poem's singularity, whereby the choice and the meaning of every word is specific to that poem. The chapter then considers two nineteenth-century examples, neither of which neatly fits this dichotomy: George Gordon Byron's Don Juan and Catherine Fanshawe's “Lord Byron's Enigma.” The first of these subversively amalgamates multiple, generally available vocabularies into its own idiosyncratic vernacular, while the second produces singular effects out of an entirely formulaic lyrical diction. The chapter thereby proposes that diction reveals in the individual poem a constitutive tension between singularity and exemplarity.

Aristotle here considers the effect of diction, or word choice, on rhetorical argument. Metaphors, epithets, special dialects, the use of the voice to convey passion or emotion, and the necessary parts of any speech are all considered here.

This book revives a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory when Romantic-period writers exploit the growing awareness of irresolutions in Kant’s third Kritik, especially in his critique of judgements of the sublime. Read with hindsight, these openings can be seen to have generated literary opportunities for writings that explicitly embraced the philosophical significance delegated to the aesthetic by Kant, but then took advantage of the licence he had conceded. Romantic writing claimed a wider significance of its own that philosophy now had to learn to rationalise. Consequent aesthetic reorientations, in which splendours and miseries become interchangeable, reflect political instabilities already exploited by feminist and nationalist writing. Falling becomes a kind of rising, and literature’s unregulated power of metamorphosis persuasively challenges hierarchies of all kinds, including its own.

Style is notoriously difficult to define; there are many different literary styles and many different ways of understanding style. This chapter discusses several of these possibilities and suggests that the work of style will be best understood by close attention to the multiple technical resources that constitute any style. This kind of attention will show that style is not separate to meaning, not merely an adornment or accessory to it, for style is inseparable from expression. In particular, it is style that generates meaning and implication, over and above the apparently paraphraseable sense. Although some Victorian novelists stated that the ideal style effaced its own presence, Victorian novels are more aware of their verbal artistry, and indeed their artifice, than some critics allow or than the ideal of transparency permits. Such a self-understanding is helpfully writ large in novels that dramatize a writer’s development of their literary style, including George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways, Charlotte Bronte’s Villette and Thomas Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta.

In his review of Our Mutual Friend (1864–5), Henry James claimed the novel showed signs of its author’s ‘exhaustion’. In this chapter, Garrett Stewart shows, by way of contrast and rebuttal, the exhaustive catalogue of stylistic effects that Dickens energetically employs in his last complete novel. The chapter individuates distinct features of style from Dickens’s long-standing repertoire – including the dextrous use of adjectives and negatives, ingenuity of syntax and inversion, sound and word play, renovation of idiom and cliché – to show Dickens flaunting and holding up to inspection his own characteristic verbal and phrasal habits.

Nicola Bradbury’s chapter on Henry James notices the force that comes from simple diction even as it expresses subtle, complicated thoughts, feelings and occasions in The Wings of the Dove (1902) and What Maisie Knew (1897). At times in these novels, a bold, clear style plays against the more verbose, analytical style we expect from late James. A style such as this repeatedly gestures towards an apprehension that is not fully expressed, something that goes behind and beyond the immediate statement. Here, style is measured at the level of the sentence and it is shown to comprise of a range of devices including alliteration, assonance, diction, syntax, rhythm, and cadence.

The chapter on words shows that even when mimicking worn-out, hackneyed speech styles, the vitality of creative language use can rescue wording from those atmospheres – of marketing and of politicking, for example – where language has become tired and predictable. The chapter considers the play of chance in any formation of wording, as the unruliness of graphemes and phonemes contributes over and above semantics. It shows that words are activated by syntax as they pass into phrases and that style emerges from the unpredictable influence of their scriptive, acoustic and etymological properties.

Iain Twiddy elucidates several strands of the pastoral that operate in Plath’s poetry, ‘including metaphysical or internal pastoral, the intimacy of pastoral with loss, mourning and elegy, and the influence of pastoral figures’. There is also Plath’s engagement ‘with classical pastoral in early poems’.