This is the first book to demonstrate the value of prose analysis across dozens of significant authors.

Garrett Stewart is the James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa.  After numerous books on fiction, poetics, film, and conceptual art, his study of Victorian narrative style, Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction, was awarded the 2011 Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative.  He is the author most recently of The Deed of Reading: Literature ¿ Writing ¿ Language ¿ Philosophy (2015) and Transmedium: Conceptualism 2.0 and the New Object Art (forthcoming), with a forthcoming volume on the language of Dickens entitled The One, Other, and Only Dickens. He was elected in 2010 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

1. Introduction: verbal investments ¿ richness, wealth, value; 2. Emergent turns: Defoe toward Dickens; 3. Stylistic microplots: Melville to Miéville; 4. A rhetorical spectrum: Wharton, Woolf, Waugh, Wallace, and beyond; 5. Inventory: some terms of engagement ¿ A to Z.