Typologies of writing styles remind me of typologies of "race": simply the act of imagining such groupings as distinct, bounded entities creates nonsense. We now know, of course (or ought to), that "race" does not exist; there are only traits, some of which are genetically linked, but many of which are not. It's the fact of static traditional societies that tended to confuse the issue: because people who lived in a place resembled each other more than people living far away, all sorts of connections were assumed between accidentals. So, style. Because writers tend to write in only one, or a narrow range of styles, this produces an effect exactly analogous to the traditional social grouping; whereas if writers wrote in all sorts of styles & combinations of stylistic features, this would be the equivalent of the modern multicultural society. --Now, the politics of getting published, that's something else: & if you observe attentively, it is often the case that a particular trait may be accepted in a writer who is already a member of the "in-group", while being rejected when an outsider uses it. Canons are thus not about style so much as they reflect the literary politics of the people who compile them. And the period immediately preceding ours has produced, out of a putative struggle to rectify the canon, not so much a new canon as a new set of canons--which has nonetheless failed to alter the catholicity of any of the agonists. --I think also of food purists: people who will eat fish but not beef, or orange foods but not green foods. Well, there may be sense to some of these preferences, but we will not discover their sense by treating them as universal laws.