THIS book offers a new focus on various connected topics in the treatment of style as a human phenomenon, and especially the style of literary artefacts. The subject of style is of intense and continuing interest, and the bibliography in the field of literary style alone is enormous. The essays that follow are therefore an attempt to contribute to the literature of a continuing study.
Style is sometimes regarded as a comparatively trivial matter, an ornamental excrescence on a meretricious work. Yet style is less a fact of the history of culture than of the history of psychology; it is an indispensable element in communication between one human being and another. As I try to show, the world is impossible to interpret without the phenomenon of style. In a sense, the apprehension of style may be the only function of the human mind. Of the various bearers of style in the arts, the subtle styles of literature are in some ways the most useful to study, as an approach to general style.
Most students of style are conscious of the fact that they are members of a world-wide group. I owe a considerable number of the observations and theoretical approaches in the following pages to long discussions with the late Henry Lee Smith, and with Archibald A. Hill. I also owe a large debt to Randolph Quirk and the members of his seminar on grammar and usage at University College, London, and to the late Aristotle Katranides. Robert Austerlitz, Roger Fowler, Donald Freeman, Morton Bloomfield, Michael Riffaterre, R. A. Sayce, all know what I owe them. Raymond Queneau was a remarkable force in many fields and on many students of style for decades. Finally, two men, Frank Kermode and Terence Hawkes, have been stimulating and provoking influences, sometimes pushing me towards the opinions in these essays, sometimes leading me away from them. The opinions are, of course, mine, but the stimulus to study the nature of style is the result of their influence and that of the contributors to the journal Language and Style during my editorship over the past ten years.