Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Verbal investments: Richness, wealth, value -- Emergent turns: Defoe toward Dickens -- Stylistic microplots: Melville to Miéville -- A rhetorical spectrum: Wharton, Woolf, Waugh, Wallace, and beyond -- Inventory: Some terms of engagement: A to Z.

"One may speak of the richness of a sentence, the wealth of its invention, but value feels less metaphoric. Why--and, if so, how deployed here? In what relation to the thread and tread, the texture and pace, of words in their ordered but not ordained row? And what critical investments are implied by even starting with such questions? How will we end up wishing to posit the worth of style in the wording of single sentences by Austen or Hawthorne or Dickens or Conrad or Woolf? Or, more to the point: wanting to ask what style is worth in the work of analysis, as well as in the tenor of response?"--