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

我的研究项目将回答的广泛问题是：在19世纪的英国，某些文学形式和修辞风格在多大程度上鼓励或阻止了争议？为了回答这个问题，我将继续研究这一时期的几种不同类型的散文，包括但不限于宗教布道、历史小说、旅行回忆录、匿名期刊散文和公开演讲。因此，该项目将研究至少六位争议论者的作品--约翰·亨利·纽曼、哈里特·马蒂诺、弗雷德里克·道格拉斯、乔治艾略特、菲茨詹姆斯·斯蒂芬和马修·阿诺德--以提供证据，证明不同的媒体以及这些媒体中包含的风格如何将礼貌的辩论转化为激烈的争议。我的目标是通过关注对抗的修辞学，为“风格”理论做出贡献--这是一场在过去十年中迅速发展起来的批评运动。剑桥植根于实用批评，并持续关注近距离阅读的艺术，一直处于风格理论复兴的前沿，与丹尼尔泰勒的“狄更斯的风格”（2013年）和迈克尔赫尔利和马库斯Waithe的“通过风格思考：漫长的十九世纪的非小说散文”（2018年）作为这一传统的两个最近的例子。

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.