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(2014) The event of style in literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
In an editorial postface to a collection of essays on The Concept of Style, Berel Lang notes how a frequently recurring opening move in discussions of style is to 'start anew, returning each time to the "beginning" of the concept".1 This is indeed typical of those studies that, rather than just using or applying the term, seek to define what style is. At the origins, however, such etymological investigations find slippage, and style reveals itself, from the beginning, to be resistant to definitional constraints and the security of a firm conceptual basis. The difficulty of establishing a definite meaning of the term 'style" is constitutive. Etymology is meant to be the science of truth, but in the case of style it fails to provide an incontestable foundation, a perfect correspondence between signifier and signified.
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Full citation:
Aquilina, M. (2014). Introduction, in The event of style in literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1-7.
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