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Thinking Through Style: Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century
What is 'style', and how does it relate to thought in language? It has often been treated as something merely linguistic, independent of thought, ornamental; stylishness for its own sake. Or else it has been said to subserve thought, by mimicking, delineating, or heightening ideas that are already expressed in the words. This ambitious and timely book explores a third, more radical possibility in which style operates as a verbal mode of thinking through.Rather than figure thought as primary and pre-verbal, and language as a secondary delivery system, style is conceived here as having the capacity to clarify or generate thinking. The book's generic focus is on non-fiction prose, and it looks across the long nineteenth century.Leading scholars survey twenty authors to show where writers who have gained reputations as either 'stylists' or as 'thinkers' exploit the interplay between 'the what' and 'the how' of their prose. The study demonstrates how celebrated stylists might, after all, have thoughts worth attending to, and that distinguished thinkers might be enriched for us if we paid more due to their style. More than reversing the conventional categories, this innovative volume shows how 'style' and 'thinking' canbe approached as a shared concern. At a moment when, especially in nineteenth-century studies, interest in style is re-emerging, this book revaluates some of the most influential figures of that age, re-imagining the possible alliances, interplays, and generative tensions between thinking, thinkers,style, and stylists.
373 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 5, 2018
7 people want to read
About the author
Michael D. Hurley
6 books2 followersHurley is Professor of Literature and Theology at the University of Cambridge, where he has worked since 2005.
As a boy, he was schooled at Stonyhurst College, a gothic pile in rural Lancashire, sometime nursery for saints as well as soldiers, and with enough flinty spirit still to light the imagination of an adolescent with a romantic turn of mind. His late father left his village school in Ireland when he was only twelve, but he loved and told powerful stories, and Hurley inherited that love, which was spurred by an exceptional teacher at Stonyhurst, and continues to characterise his approach to literature. Whereas contemporary literary criticism is often marked by a so-called ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ — bent on exposing what’s limited or bigoted about a given text — Hurley believes there is more profit (and pleasure) in exploring what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once called art’s ‘secret inner light’; that is, its goodness, truth, and beauty.
After school, Hurley followed a decently straight line through my studies, but also struck out beyond the beaten bounds of the library and the classroom. He worked for two separate years in Japan and Romania, in the latter country while it was suffering extreme hardship following the overthrow of Nicolae Ceaușescu; and in the same period he also helped deliver aid through Croatia, in the immediate wake of its War of Independence.
As an undergraduate Hurley read for a four year MA at St Andrews, taking Honours in English, but also studying Classics and Philosophy; playing rugby for the University was its own education. His PhD at Cambridge was on the pyrotechnical poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and when not working away at his doctorate – tumbling down the rabbit hole of prosodic theory, or so it seemed – he spent a chunk of my weekends and evenings in a barracks, and on the wind-swept Brecon Beacons, undergoing selection and training with the 21st Special Air Service Regiment, a reserve special forces unit of the army.
After his PhD, Hurley gained a Fellowship at Cambridge, where he has stayed since, while also taking refreshing advantage of sabbatical stints abroad (with his wife and three daughters) — as a Visiting Scholar in the English Department at Harvard, for instance; and most recently, in Savannah, Georgia, helping to establish a new university, Ralston College.
Hurley's research focuses on literary style and form, and on literature’s interrelations with philosophy and theology. He was the Interdisciplinary Fellow in Philosophy at CRASSH in 2018, and a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, in Trinity term 2021. Recent books include a study of religious poets from William Blake to T. S. Eliot, a revaluation of the genius of G. K. Chesterton, and an introduction to Poetic Form.
Above all, Hurley's scholarly interests are directed towards ultimate questions and questions of value; and in this vein, he also frequently writes, gives talks and public lectures for a non-academic audience, on the great ideas and works of art and literature that shape the way we understand ourselves and the world.
Hurley is a Trustee of The Christian Heritage Centre, believing passionately in the importance of remembering and recovering, as well as critically engaging, ‘the fine things that were thought and done by our forebears’.
As a boy, he was schooled at Stonyhurst College, a gothic pile in rural Lancashire, sometime nursery for saints as well as soldiers, and with enough flinty spirit still to light the imagination of an adolescent with a romantic turn of mind. His late father left his village school in Ireland when he was only twelve, but he loved and told powerful stories, and Hurley inherited that love, which was spurred by an exceptional teacher at Stonyhurst, and continues to characterise his approach to literature. Whereas contemporary literary criticism is often marked by a so-called ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ — bent on exposing what’s limited or bigoted about a given text — Hurley believes there is more profit (and pleasure) in exploring what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once called art’s ‘secret inner light’; that is, its goodness, truth, and beauty.
After school, Hurley followed a decently straight line through my studies, but also struck out beyond the beaten bounds of the library and the classroom. He worked for two separate years in Japan and Romania, in the latter country while it was suffering extreme hardship following the overthrow of Nicolae Ceaușescu; and in the same period he also helped deliver aid through Croatia, in the immediate wake of its War of Independence.
As an undergraduate Hurley read for a four year MA at St Andrews, taking Honours in English, but also studying Classics and Philosophy; playing rugby for the University was its own education. His PhD at Cambridge was on the pyrotechnical poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and when not working away at his doctorate – tumbling down the rabbit hole of prosodic theory, or so it seemed – he spent a chunk of my weekends and evenings in a barracks, and on the wind-swept Brecon Beacons, undergoing selection and training with the 21st Special Air Service Regiment, a reserve special forces unit of the army.
After his PhD, Hurley gained a Fellowship at Cambridge, where he has stayed since, while also taking refreshing advantage of sabbatical stints abroad (with his wife and three daughters) — as a Visiting Scholar in the English Department at Harvard, for instance; and most recently, in Savannah, Georgia, helping to establish a new university, Ralston College.
Hurley's research focuses on literary style and form, and on literature’s interrelations with philosophy and theology. He was the Interdisciplinary Fellow in Philosophy at CRASSH in 2018, and a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, in Trinity term 2021. Recent books include a study of religious poets from William Blake to T. S. Eliot, a revaluation of the genius of G. K. Chesterton, and an introduction to Poetic Form.
Above all, Hurley's scholarly interests are directed towards ultimate questions and questions of value; and in this vein, he also frequently writes, gives talks and public lectures for a non-academic audience, on the great ideas and works of art and literature that shape the way we understand ourselves and the world.
Hurley is a Trustee of The Christian Heritage Centre, believing passionately in the importance of remembering and recovering, as well as critically engaging, ‘the fine things that were thought and done by our forebears’.
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