One may speak of the richness of a sentence, the wealth of its invention, but value feels less metaphoric. Why – and, if so, how deployed here? In what relation to the thread and tread, the texture and pace, of words in their ordered but not ordained row? And what critical investments are implied by even starting with such questions? How will we end up wishing to posit the worth of style in the wording of single sentences by Austen or Hawthorne or Dickens or Conrad or Woolf? Or, more to the point: wanting to ask what style is worth in the work of analysis, as well as in the tenor of response?

Style is language in action. Accordingly, these chapters argue for the place of prose in our attention to prose fiction. Rescuing stylistic consideration of the English novel from an epoch of neglect, the book is intended for a cross section of literary readers interested in the nature and grain of fictional writing, with examples drawn from the whole history of British and American fiction, including the special translingual cases of Conrad and Nabokov. Yet the emphasis is not “authorial.” Style is understood not as a “signature effect” but, instead, as a matter of literary ways and means. Emphasis falls not on the identifiable stylistic profile of one writer versus another, but rather on the stylistic registers that identify the work of writing in process, making its way and its meaning in words. And those registers are linguistic all the way down. It is a given of this study that broad exhibition of this point, over a wide array of writers and their fiction, can only help secure the claim. With ambitious prose, prose on the verbal stretch, one can dip in almost anywhere, from chosen writer to chosen novel. The question is only how deep – to what formative strata – that dip tends to reach.

The inaugural book in this Cambridge series, Peter Boxall's The Value of the Novel, is a study to whose phenomenological and cultural appraisal my volume would add the often-discounted measure of style on the ledger of assessment.