ABSTRACT
The author of a popular encyclopaedia entry on non-fi ctional prose, while conceding that to defi ne it ‘is an immensely challenging task’, nevertheless confi dently goes on to characterize the genre as ‘any literary work that is based mainly on fact’, such as ‘the essay and biography’. Excluded from this category are any ‘highly scientifi c and erudite writings in which no aesthetic concern is evinced’.1 Leaving aside for the moment the confl ation of the ‘literary’ with the ‘aesthetic’, we can note how this defi nition recalls the practice of an earlier generation of literary historians, such as F. W. Bateson, whose account of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy in his 1940 Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature treated non-fi ctional prose as being more or less synonymous with a tradition of critical writing, the value of which resided as much in what Stefan Collini has described as the distinctive ‘voice’ of the critic as in the originality or cogency of the ideas expressed (Collini 1988: 1). More recently Collini has invoked the power of voice to explain the remarkably longevity of Newman’s The Idea of a University, a volume which, he claims, continues to command the attention of modern readers despite the fact that many aspects of its argument are irrelevant, dated, or transparently erroneous (Collini 2010). In the mid-nineteenth century that voice-traditionally to be found in the work of Victorian ‘sages’ such as Carlyle, Arnold, Mill, and Ruskin-might range widely, moving effortlessly among topics such as religion, history, science, philosophy, and politics, as well as literature and the arts, at least until the 1880s when far-reaching changes in the social organization of knowledge increasingly came to equate authority and expertise with specialization and professionalization. As Philip Davis puts matters in his contribution to the new Oxford English Literary History: ‘no realm of discourse was closed to a writer such as John Ruskin’. For Ruskin, Davis argues, non-fi ctional prose was a ‘neutral medium, the common meeting ground, for acts of translation between different discourses’. He goes on to argue that it is the very range of Ruskin’s interests which exemplify the quality which made nineteenth-century discursive writing distinct: ‘the overriding effort to investigate all areas of human concern’ produced a ‘purposeful subordinate prose, relatively unconcerned with its own status, classifi cation, or autonomy’ (Davis 2002: 404-5). Davis’s predication of ‘purpose’ seems more or less equivalent to Collini’s attribute of ‘voice’, in the sense that both
concepts are diffi cult to understand in isolation from the way in which an authorial persona is constructed via rhetorical strategies, a process exemplifi ed in what Davis later refers to as the ‘cumulatively cajoling’ language of Thomas Carlyle (406).
