ABSTRACT
The notion of style plays an important role in a number of disciplines (e.g. anthropology, archeology, art history and publishing) – the theory of art has no monopoly on the concept. In fact, the earliest systematic discussions of style appear in Greek and Roman writings on rhetoric. The term ‘style’ (derived from the Latin word ‘stilus,’ which refers to the mechanism used for writing on wax tablets in ancient Rome) is used widely in ordinary discourse to characterize a range of non-aesthetic and non-artistic activities and objects. Nonetheless, style is a central notion in the arts, and it is primarily from the perspective of the arts that it will be discussed in this chapter.
