Victorian Controversialists: Literary Form and the Rhetoric of Confrontation, 1830-1888

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The broad question my research project will answer is the following: to what extent did certain literary forms and rhetorical styles encourage or discourage controversy in nineteenth-century Britain? To answer this question, I will proceed by looking at several different types of prose during the period, including, but not limited to, the religious sermon, the historical novel, the travel memoir, the anonymous periodical essay, and the public lecture. The project will thereforeexamine the work of at least six controversialists - John Henry Newman, Harriet Martineau, Frederick Douglass, George Eliot, Fitzjames Stephen, and Matthew Arnold - to provide evidence of how different media, and the styles contained within those media, transform polite debate into heated controversy. My goal is for the project to contribute to 'style' theory - a critical movement that has grown rapidly in the past decade - by focusing on the rhetoric of confrontation.Cambridge, with its roots in practical criticism, and its continued focus on the art of close reading, has been at the forefront of style theory's renaissance, with Daniel Tyler's "Dickens's Style" (2013) and Michael Hurley and Marcus Waithe's "Thinking Through Style: Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century" (2018) as two recent examples in this tradition.