Silas K. Hocking, Her Benny, and the Poetics of the Prolific

Abstract

Focusing on Her Benny (1878), this chapter argues that Silas K. Hocking’s phenomenally popular novels foreground questions of interpretation and the role of writing in conveying truth. They do so in a thematic focus on acts of reading, and in a style that moves between plain, unornamented prose, and metaphors of religious experience. Contemporary critics dismissed ‘Silas K. Hocking English’ as popular fiction’s failure to produce innovative prose; this chapter argues that, in Aristotelian fashion, Hocking employs such style to connect morality with linguistic clarity. Aristotle’s notion of good style as clarity that embeds occasional ornamentation as a kind of hospitality is reflected in Her Benny’s use of figuration at moments when characters engage with Methodism, and in the novel’s thematisation of the demands of hospitality.