Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction

'Matthew Sussman offers an eye-opening account of style in the nineteenth century … wonderful, and rigorous … It is one of the rare books that has helped me understand much better a term—'style'—I use every day. It is a book to be grateful for.' Jesse Rosenthal, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 'Matthew Sussman fascinatingly connects two concepts that today's reader would be more likely to oppose: style and virtue. Sussman's striking claim in the book is that the verbal qualities of a text, even when considered separately from the text's content, can have ethical or moral value … One of its invaluable contributions to the field is to situate Victorian fiction in a long history of rhetorical criticism that takes Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric as its source of inspiration. In chapters that are both philosophically robust and painstakingly researched, Sussman establishes how stylistic virtues resemble moral virtues in providing a characterological ideal.' Judging Panel, 2021 AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship