ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book reveals the rhetorical consciousness of nineteenth-century critics who continued to make claims for the possibility of critical truth in the face of new print media, and new arguments about what their most basic material for communication—namely, language—consisted of, and how it worked. By 1892, however, the identity of the man of letters—of the nineteenth-century British critic—has become bifurcated to such a degree that he must be reduced to a unique, indivisible man, or else perish in the sea of black and white print. One destination of the romantic disdain for bookishness and the parallel valorization of colloquial language that authors found in Thomas De Quincey's theory of style, for instance, becomes the popular association of a learned style with the absence of vitality and personality.
