ABSTRACT
It should come as a surprise that the notion of style is elusive: after all, style is often taken to pertain to the surface (rather than the substance) of a (literary) work of art. The elements of style should, thus, lie open before our eyes and be easy to discern. Moreover, we all seem to have a clear intuitive understanding of style: we know that it is essential to the aesthetic dimension of a work and makes it accessible for aesthetic appreciation, we are familiar with the idea that it allows us to attribute a work to an author, a genre, a school, or a period, and might even think that it reveals the artistic personality of the author. Yet we find that there is no universally accepted definition of “style.” Moreover, the numerous definitions that have been proposed in the past highlight very different aspects that often stand in contrast to one another, which shows that style has many faces, is rich of different dimensions and performs a great variety of functions: it has been characterized as a “dress of thought” that adorns a pre-existing content; as a choice between alternative expressions; as a set of recurrent, individual, or collective characteristics; as signature; as an expression of the author’s personality; as a way of writing dictated by rules or an acquired disposition to act on a set of rules; but also as a systematic violation of rules or deviation from a norm; it is taken to be an expression of originality, to manifest a perspective or point of view, or to foreground the possible uses of a medium and so to draw our attention to the workings of language.
