Novel Style

Reviews / Votes

Ben Masters Novel Style is indeed a masterly critical achievement. His close readings of writings by Anthony Burgess, Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, and others are superb in their sensitivity and acuity. Not only does Masters develop fresh insights into how such authors relate ethics and prose style so that style itself becomes an ethical matter, he also draws on a diverse range of literary criticism and theory to present original thinking about the intimacy of literature to ethics and morality more generally. * Alex Houen, University Senior Lecturer and Fellow of Pembroke College, University of Cambridge * The work of Angela Carter, Martin Amis, and other stylists of excess, has become difficult to read in recent years, as our capacity to account for the effects of literary style has weakened. To respond to these stylists -- to respond to style -- requires us now to invent a new critical vocabulary, and to forge a new kind of critical voice. Ben Masters, in Novel Style, has achieved both of these things. He has a striking critical voice that is as revealing as it is original, and his work offers a new way of understanding the ethical power of style. This book will become a necessary reference point for any discussion of literary fiction in the modern and contemporary period. * Peter Boxall, Professor of English, University of Sussex *