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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Masters, Ben, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

English fiction--21st century--History and criticism.

English fiction--Moral and ethical aspects.

Literary style.

Physical Description:

xi, 200 pages ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Other Title:

Ethics and excess in English fiction since the 1960s

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2017.

Summary:

"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."-- Dust jacket.

Contents:

1 The Higher Morality; Anthony Burgess and 'The Business of Moral Choice' 24

2 Ifs, Buts, and Maybes: Angela Carter's Grammar of Curiosity 62

3 'The King in his Countinghouse: Martin Amis and the Decorum of Excess 98

4 Twenty-First-Century Excess: Levels of Narration in Contemporary Fiction 137.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 181-194) and index.

ISBN:

9780198766148

0198766149

OCLC:

994426334