23 https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.61.2.08 English eng Harris, Lech Contributor <p><span style="color: rgb(85, 85, 85); font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">This essay links two concurrent literary trends that unfolded in Britain between the 1850s and 1890s: a turn in novelistic practice against the convention of the chatty, rhetorical author, and a new critical enthusiasm for theorizations of prose style. In these decades, a new concept of style emerged in which the author's persona was abstracted and diffused into the intimate details of composition. This understanding of style was incompatible with an earlier sense of the author as a rhetorical, speaking presence in the text. Style and narrative, then, are not separable or opposable terms; rather, style's historical dispensations are inextricable from the history of narrative forms. By tracking the oral aesthetic of Joseph Conrad's early work, this paper traces the ways in which the markers of orality and rhetoric were repurposed into the intricate, telling details of style.</span><br></p> Indiana University Press Winter 2019 pdf ISSN 0042-5222 English literature Elliptical Orality: Rhetoric as Style in Conrad mixed material Indiana University Press