8. The belles-letters style (the substyle of emotive prose)

The belles-lettres style is a generic term for the following three substyles: (1) the language of poetry (verse), (2) emotive prose (fiction) and (3) drama.

The substyle of emotive prose has the same common features as have been pointed out for the belles-lettres style in general, such as

1. Genuine imagery achieved by purely linguistic devices.

2. The use of words in contextual and very often in more than one dictionary meaning, or at least greatly influenced by the lexical environment.

3. A vocabulary which will reflect to a greater or lesser degree the author's personal evaluation of thing or phenomena.

4.A peculiar individual selection of vocabulary and syntax, a kind of lexical and syntactical idiosyncrasy.

The imagery is not so rich as it is in poetry; the percentage of words with contextual meaning is not so high as in poetry. The combination of the literary variant of the language both in words and syntax, with the colloquial variant. It would perhaps be more exact to define this as a combination of the spoken and written varieties of the language, there are always two forms of communication present - monologue (the writer's speech) and dialogue (the speech of the characters).

Emotive prose as a separate form of imaginative literature, that is fiction, came into being rather late in the history of the English literary language. It is well known that in early Anglo-Saxon literature there was no emotive prose. Anglo-Saxon literature was mainly poetry, songs of a religious, military and festive character. The first emotive prose, which appeared, was translations from Latin of stories from the Вible and the Lives of the Saints. Middle English prose literature was also educational, represented mostly by translations of religious works from Latin.

Emotive prose actually began to assume a life of its own in the second half of the 15th century when romances and chronicles describing the life and adventures of semi-legendary kings and knights began to appear.

With the coming of the 16 century,which incidentally heralded a great advance in all spheres of English social life, English emotive prose progressed rapidly. Numerous translations from Latin and Greek p1ayed a great role in helping to work out stylistic norms for the emotive prose of that period.

The 17centurysaw a considerable development in emotive prose. It was an epoch of great political and religious strife, and much that was written had a publicistic aim.

18centuryemotive prose when compared to that of the seventeenth is, in its most essential, leading features, characterized by the predominance of the third trend. This third trend, which may justly be called realistic, is not the further development of the puritan tendencies described above, although, doubtless, these tendencies bore some relevance to its typical features. The motto of this trend may be expressed by the phrase "call a spade a spade."

19centuryemotive prose can already be regarded as a substyle of the belles-lettres language style.

Present-dayemotive prose is to a large extent characterized by the breaking-up of traditional syntactical designs of the preceding periods. Not only detached construction, but also fragmentation of syntactical models, peculiar, unexpected ways of combining sentences, especially the gap-sentence link and other modern syntactical patterns, are freely introduced into present-day emotive prose.