ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key words disscussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book turns its attention from early nineteenth-century discussions of the periodical market to some of the rhetorical concepts that informed the vocabulary of these discussions. It focuses on the more positive and implicated interpretations of the impact of the popular monthly magazine upon literature. The book focuses on Thomas De Quincey's first writings for the London Magazine, and his subsequent essays on style and rhetoric published in Blackwood's. It focuses on debates about truth and sincerity in writing during the 1850s and early 1860s, an important moment of transition for British criticism. The book argues that late Victorian stylistic theory invests the individual critic with the power to construct a desirable national character specifically by John Ruskin ability to naturalize in style the linguistically manifest, multitudinous forces of modernity.
