The introduction outlines the kind of attention to prose techniques that forms the basis for the chapters that follow. It claims that prose is all too infrequently granted this kind of attention. In part, this is because of the claims to ordinariness that prose writing often proposes for itself, where prose comes to seem either prosaic or prosy. Critical and philosophical traditions have reinforced the view that prose is at its best when it effaces itself, when it conceals its own wording. But this principle has tended to distract from the craft of prose. The introduction outlines the parts of prose (punctuation, words, sentences, and so on) and the various genres (realism, comedy, Gothic, science fiction, and creative non-fiction) that subsequent chapters take up for inspection as regards the techniques of prose themselves.

This chapter shows that marks of punctuation are continuous with the much larger forms of punctuation that interrupt human experiences in time and space, especially ‘larger relations of voice and body, space and absence’. The chapter shows that punctuation has ‘reciprocal and reflexive relationships’ with what it punctuates while at the same time punctuation marks can work ‘as reminders of and reflections on vocal and bodily presence’.

This chapter discusses a grammar of realism that calls upon a variety of prose effects, including the management of time effects and the presence of abundant or telling detail, to show what is at stake in realist writing and how much happens in the prose despite its alleged retreat from artifice. Although realism has found itself assailed periodically, often for its artifice, this chapter testifies to the enduring value of realist prose while offering insights into its evolution.

This chapter considers chapters themselves as a ‘form of punctuation’, and so they structure our experience of time in reading novels while also offering interventions into our understanding of time in the rest of our lives. This chapter on chapters tracks the history of this principle of narrative organisation as well as various playful attempts to test or defy its conventional limits, showing that chapter division is itself a stylistic device.

Whether in biography, the biographical novel, the memoir or various other subgenres of life writing, the writer must be responsibly committed to both truth and imagination, to both fact and fiction. Jay Parini’s chapter considers a wide range of life writing and observes the various priorities afforded to truth and imagination in the work. Whatever access to archives, testimonies and evidence life writers need, they need above all, in Parini’s phrase, ‘access to the resources of language’.

Alison Milbank’s chapter on Gothic prose, ranging from Ann Radcliffe in the late eighteenth century to contemporary Gothic, shows how often language in these works verges on the inexpressible, reminding us that our rational understanding of human experience may only be partial. Language that superanimates the natural world, the frequent use of em dashes that gesture towards the unsaid, even the unsayable, grotesque and arabesque styles, and equivocal, combinatory techniques are all mobilised to create a set of effects that test the limits of our capacity for understanding.

Nature writing has been parodied for what Richard Kerridge identifies as ‘purple prose’. Given the remarkable resurgence of the popularity of nature writing in the first decades of this century, this chapter considers how nature writers now can develop a prose style that avoids the excesses traditionally associated with the genre and that will face up to and not shrink from the threats to nature, including ‘global warming and the huge loss of wildlife populations’, that demand perspectival shifts between the local and the global, the personal and the planetary.

Roslyn Jolly’s chapter discusses the particular burden carried by the prose of the travel writer. Travel writing faces such potentially opposing tasks as to render a foreign scene strange and exotic while bestowing it with an air of authenticity and verisimilitude, and in doing so makes it appeal to the senses and exercises telling control or choice of narrative perspective. These various pressures and strategies appear fairly consistently throughout the long history of travel writing, which takes in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Orwell and Jonathan Raban. They also cross into prose fiction, where it is influenced by the travel memoir or tourist guide.

Comic prose has much in common with other genres and styles; timing and balance, for example, are integral to its effects. Jonathan Greenberg and David Galef offer an examination of many different techniques in comic writing that build upon and depart from familiar strategies, many of them relying on upending expectations. The chapter enumerates various techniques, including reversal, elaboration, soundplay, excess (and restraint) and parody.

The chapter on words shows that even when mimicking worn-out, hackneyed speech styles, the vitality of creative language use can rescue wording from those atmospheres – of marketing and of politicking, for example – where language has become tired and predictable. The chapter considers the play of chance in any formation of wording, as the unruliness of graphemes and phonemes contributes over and above semantics. It shows that words are activated by syntax as they pass into phrases and that style emerges from the unpredictable influence of their scriptive, acoustic and etymological properties.

Conceptualizing Hildegard of Bingen as a theologian has been impeded by a pervading focus on her visionary status. The author provides a fruitful reassessment of Hildegard’s theology by contextualizing her writings along three coordinates: the authoritative texts she cites, the institutional environment in which theological discussion takes place, and the audience to whom the theology is directed. Her responsibility as magistra of her community led her to construct her trilogy of visions – Scivias, Liber vitae meritorum, and Liber divinorum operum – not just as visionary writings for the broader church but as a structured theological system to aid her nuns pedagogically. Analysis of her writings reveals a systematic methodology of theological instruction, including her use of classical rhetoric; additionally, her concerns for her nuns’ spiritual welfare are reflected in a customized presentation of theological topics. Ultimately, understanding Hildegard’s theology as a direct response to her immediate community reframes it and highlights its similarities to twelfth-century methods of theological instruction.

This chapter introduces readers to the most popular work through which Hildegard of Bingen was known throughout Europe in the centuries after her death, the Pentachronon (also known as the Speculum futurorum temporum siue Pentachronon sancte Hildegardis). The Pentachronon is an anthology of excerpts from Hildegard’s authentic writings that was created by Gebeno of Eberbach in the early thirteenth century and it enjoyed a pan-European circulation through the seventeenth century. This sophisticated anthology includes Hildegard’s apocalyptic prophecies of present and future history from the Scivias, the Book of Divine Works, and her letters, as well as excerpts from her correspondence in which she offered spiritual direction and counsel through her prophetic gift. An overview of the main apocalyptic narrative of the anthology is provided and particular attention is paid to the way in which Hildegard as a prophet and her apocalyptic teachings were presented for premodern readers in the three main versions of the anthology.