The Invention of Style.

Author/Editor
Nolan, Maura.

Title
The Invention of Style.

Published
Nolan, Maura. "The Invention of Style." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 41 (2019): 33-71, A1-A12.

Review
Nolan's abstract to her article conceivably provides the most succinct summary of what she has done: "This paper traces the emergence of style in English writing from the fourteenth century to the sixteenth century, performing textual analysis at both the macro and micro level by using computer software (Voyant; Stylo for R; AntConc) in tandem with traditional close reading. Two major databases were deployed: first, a collection of 279 Middle English digital texts. . . and second, the Middle English Glossarial Database created by Professor Larry D. Benson, which includes lemmatized texts of Chaucer and Gower's English corpora. The results show that the literary sense of 'style' is introduced to the English literary tradition by Chaucer, by way of Petrarch, and then more fully explored by Lydgate, especially in his "Fall of Princes." Using stylometry software (Stylo for R by M.Eder), the essay shows in a series of graphs how Chaucer and Gower's style are distinct from one another, using principal components analysis, cluster analysis, a bootstrap consensus tree, and network analysis; these graphs also show a clear distinction between Chaucer's verse and his prose . . . . the difference between Chaucer and Gower is related to these writers' explicit gestures toward 'high style' (Chaucer) and the 'plain style' (Gower). The final section of the paper . . . [shows] that Lydgate pioneered the notion of a writer's personal style, in contradistinction to the rhetorical levels of style (high and low) to which Chaucer and Gower refer" (33-34). It should be noted, parenthetically, that by relying on Benson's Glossarial Database for all of her examples, Nolan's conclusions apply only to the "Confessio Amantis"; Gower's French and Latin poetry, which exhibit a variety of styles, both "high" and "plain," are excluded from her study, with the exception of a brief mention in fn. 27 (49). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1]

Date
2019

Gower Subjects
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations