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- Title
Stylistic Virtue in Nineteenth-Century Criticism.
- Authors
SUSSMAN, MATTHEW
- Abstract
Victorian critical prose is pervaded by virtue terms that strike the modern critic as obsolete and imprecise. However, words such as “manly” and “chaste” could do double duty, referring to both moral and stylistic character without necessarily conflating them. This vocabulary, which derives from Aristotelian virtue ethics and belletristic rhetoric, persists across the writings of John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Pater because it appealed to critics who sought to enhance the distinctiveness of aesthetic appreciation without depriving it of ethical force. Stylistic formalism thereby rises to prominence toward the end of the Victorian period not as a reaction against mid-century moralism but rather as its logical extension.
- Subjects
VIRTUE in literature; ETHICS in literature; LITERARY style; VOCABULARY in literature; 19TH century English literature; LITERARY criticism; RUSKIN, John, 1819-1900; ARNOLD, Matthew, 1822-1888; PATER, Walter, 1839-1894
- Publication
Victorian Studies, 2014, Vol 56, Issue 2, p225
- ISSN
0042-5222
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2979/victorianstudies.56.2.225