Advances in Stylistics – serie

In this book, Yufang Ho compares the text style difference between the two versions of John Fowles' The Magus, exemplifying the methodological principles and analytic practices of the corpus stylistic approach. The Magus was first published in 1966 and was revised and republished by Fowles in 1977. Fowles' own comment on the second edition was that it was 'rather more than a stylistic revision.' The book explores how the revised version is linguistically different from the original, especially in terms of point of view (re) representation. The corpus stylistic approach adopted combines qualitative and quantitative comparison to confirm the overall text style difference. The analysis demonstrates that computer assisted methods can identify significant linguistic features which literary critics have not noticed and provide a more detailed descriptive basis for literary interpretation of (either edition) of the novel. This analysis of The Magus serves as a case study and exemplar of how corpus techniques may be used generally in the study of linguistics.

Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances our understanding of mind style: the experience of other minds, or worldviews, through language in literature. This book is the first to set out a detailed, unified framework for the analysis of mind style using the account of language and cognition set out in cognitive grammar.Drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics, Louise Nuttall aims to explain how character and narrator minds are created linguistically, with a focus on the strange minds encountered in the genre of speculative fiction. Previous analyses of mind style are reconsidered using cognitive grammar, alongside original analyses of four novels by Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Matheson and J.G. Ballard. Responses to the texts in online forums and literary critical studies ground the analyses in the experiences of readers, and support an investigation of this effect as an embodied experience cued by the language of a text. Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances both stylistics and cognitive linguistics, whilst offering new insights for research in speculative fiction.

Focusing on the first journal in The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, this book writes a convincing case for the value of corpus-based stylistics and narrative psychology in the analysis of representations of the experience of affective states.Situated at the intersection between language study, psychology and healthcare, this study of the personal writing of a poet and novelist showcases a cutting-edge combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches, including metaphor analysis, corpus methods, and second person narration. Techniques that systematically account for representations of experiences of affective states, such as those in this book, are rare and crucial in improving understanding of these experiences. The findings and methods of this book therefore potentially have bearing on the study, diagnosis and treatment of depression and other mental illnesses. Zsófia Demjén follows the cognitive turn in both literary studies and linguistics here, emerging with a greater understanding of Plath, her diarized output and her experience of her inner world.

Over the last two decades, the study of discourse in film and television has become one of the most promising research avenues in stylistics and pragmatics due to the dazzling variety of source material and the huge pragmatic range within it. Meanwhile, with the advent of streaming and the box set, film and television themselves are becoming separated by an increasingly blurred line.This volume closes a long-standing gap in stylistics research, bringing together a book-level pragmastylistic showcase. It presents current developments from the field from two complementary perspectives, looking stylistically at the discourse in film and the discourse of and around film. This latter phrase comes to mean the approaches which try to account for the pragmatic effects induced by cinematography. This might be the camera work or the lighting, or the mise en scène or montage. The volume takes a multimodal approach, looking at word, movement and gesture, in keeping with modern stylistics.The volume shows how pragmatic themes and methods are adapted and applied to films, including speech acts, (im)politeness, implicature and context. In this way, it provides systematic insights into how meanings are displayed, enhanced, suppressed and negotiated in both film and televisual arts.

Text World Theory is a powerful framework for discourse analysis that, thus far, has only been used in monolingual Anglophone stylistic analyses. This work adapts Text World Theory for the analysis of Spanish discourse, and in doing so suggests some improvements to the way in which it deals with discourse - in particular, with direct speech and conditional expressions. Furthermore, it applies Text World Theory in a novel way, searching not for style in language, but for the style of a language.Focusing principally on deixis and modality, the author examines whether Spanish speakers and English speakers construct the narrative text-world in any patterned ways. To do so, the ‘frog story’ methodology is employed, eliciting spoken narratives from native adult speakers of both languages by means of a children’s picture book. These narratives are transcribed and subjected to a qualitative text-world analysis, which is supported with a quantitative corpus analysis. The results reveal contrasts in Spanish and English speakers’ use of modality and deixis in building the same narrative text-world, and are relevant to scholars working in language typology, cross-cultural pragmatics and translation studies. These novel applications of the Text World Theory push the boundaries of stylistics in new directions, broadening the focus from monolingual texts to languages at large.

World Building represents the state-of-the-discipline in worlds-based approaches to discourse, collected together for the first time. Over the last 40 years the 'text-as-world' metaphor has become one of the most prevalent and productive means of describing the experiencing of producing and receiving discourse. This has been the case in a range of disciplines, including stylistics, cognitive poetics, narratology, discourse analysis and literary theory.The metaphor has enabled analysts to formulate a variety of frameworks for describing and examining the textual and conceptual mechanics involved in human communication, articulating these variously through such concepts as 'possible worlds', 'text-worlds' and 'storyworlds'. Each of these key approaches shares an understanding of discourse as a logically grounded, cognitively and pragmatically complex phenomenon. Discourse in this sense is capable of producing highly immersive and emotionally affecting conceptual spaces in the minds of discourse participants.The chapters examine how best to document and analyze this and this is an essential collection for stylisticians, linguists and narrative theorists.

This book focuses on how readers can be ‘manipulated’ during their experience of reading fictional texts and how they are incited to perceive, process and interpret certain textual patterns. Offering fine-grained stylistic analysis of diverse genres, including crime fiction, short stories, poetry and novels, the book deciphers various linguistic, pragmatic and multimodal techniques. These are skilfully used by authors to achieve specific effects through a subtle manipulation of deixis, metalepsis, dialogue, metaphors, endings, inferences or rhetorical, narratorial and typographical control.Exploring contemporary texts such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Remains of the Day and We Need to Talk About Kevin, chapters delve into how readers are pragmatically positioned or cognitively (mis)directed as the author guides their attention and influences their judgment. They also show how readers’ responses can, conversely, bring about a certain form of manipulation as readers challenge the positions the texts invite them to occupy.

Crime narratives form a large and central part of the modern cultural landscape. This book explores the cognitive stylistic processing of prose and audiovisual fictional crime 'texts'. It also examines instances where such narratives find themselves, through popular demand, 'migrating' - meaning that they cross languages, media formats and/or cultures.In doing so, Crime Fiction Migration proposes a move from a monomodal to a multimodal approach to the study of crime fiction. Examining original crime fiction works alongside their translations, adaptations and remakings proves instrumental in understanding how various semiotic modes interact with one another. The book analyses works such as We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Killing trilogy and the reimaginings of plays such as Shear Madness and films such as Funny Games.Crime fiction is consistently popular and 'on the move' - witness the spate of detective series exported out of Scandinavia, or the ever popular exporting of these shows from the USA. This multimodal and semiotically-aware analysis of global crime narratives expands the discipline and is key reading for students of linguistics, criminology, literature and film.

In recent years, the Cognitive Grammar account of language and mind has become an influential framework for the study of textual meaning and interpretation. This book is the first to bring together applications of Cognitive Grammar for a range of stylistic purposes, including the analysis of both literary and non-literary discourse. Demonstrating the diverse range of uses for Cognitive Grammar, chapters apply this framework to diverse text-types including poetry, narrative fiction, comics, press reports, political discourse and music, as well as exploring its potential for the teaching of language and literature in a range of contexts. Combining cutting-edge research in cognitive, critical and pedagogical stylistics, New Directions in Cognitive Grammar and Style showcases the latest developments in this field and offers new insights into our experiences of literary and non-literary texts by drawing on current understandings of language and cognition.

Narrative Retellings presents pioneering work at the intersection of stylistics and narrative study to provide new insights into the diverse forms of fictional and factual narratives and their retellings. Common types of retelling, such as translation, adaptation, textual intervention and reader responses are reconceptualised in the chapters, and fresh insights are offered into experiences retold as autofiction, witness statements and advertorials on social media. From modernising the most cherished novels of Jane Austen to deciphering conflicting testimonials following the Hillsborough disaster, this volume reveals the complexities involved in all forms of narrative retellings. As such, it makes a valuable contribution to the interdisciplinary study of stylistics and to the understanding of narrative texts.

Shortlisted for the ESSE 2022 Book AwardsShortlisted for the 2022 SAES / AFEA Research PrizeBuilding on an upsurge of interest in the Americanisation of British novels triggered by the Harry Potter series, this book explores the various ways that British novels, from children’s fiction to travelogues and Book Prize winners, have been adapted and rewritten for the US market.Drawing on a vast corpus of over 80 works and integrating the latest research in multimodality and stylistics, Linda Pillière analyses the modifications introduced to make British English texts more culturally acceptable and accessible to the American English reader. From paratextual differences in cover, illustrations, typeface and footnotes to dialectal changes to lexis, tense, syntax and punctuation, Pillière explores the sociocultural and ideological pressures involved in intralingual translation and shows how the stylistic effects of such changes – including loss of meaning, voice, rhythm and word play – often result in a more muted American edition. In doing so, she reveals how homing in on numerous small adjustments can provide fascinating insights into the American publishing process and readership.

Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances our understanding of mind style: the experience of other minds, or worldviews, through language in literature. This book is the first to set out a detailed, unified framework for the analysis of mind style using the account of language and cognition set out in cognitive grammar.Drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics, Louise Nuttall aims to explain how character and narrator minds are created linguistically, with a focus on the strange minds encountered in the genre of speculative fiction. Previous analyses of mind style are reconsidered using cognitive grammar, alongside original analyses of four novels by Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Matheson and J.G. Ballard. Responses to the texts in online forums and literary critical studies ground the analyses in the experiences of readers, and support an investigation of this effect as an embodied experience cued by the language of a text. Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances both stylistics and cognitive linguistics, whilst offering new insights for research in speculative fiction.

Narrative Retellings presents pioneering work at the intersection of stylistics and narrative study to provide new insights into the diverse forms of fictional and factual narratives and their retellings. Common types of retelling, such as translation, adaptation, textual intervention and reader responses are reconceptualised in the chapters, and fresh insights are offered into experiences retold as autofiction, witness statements and advertorials on social media. From modernising the most cherished novels of Jane Austen to deciphering conflicting testimonials following the Hillsborough disaster, this volume reveals the complexities involved in all forms of narrative retellings. As such, it makes a valuable contribution to the interdisciplinary study of stylistics and to the understanding of narrative texts.

In recent years, the Cognitive Grammar account of language and mind has become an influential framework for the study of textual meaning and interpretation. This book is the first to bring together applications of Cognitive Grammar for a range of stylistic purposes, including the analysis of both literary and non-literary discourse. Demonstrating the diverse range of uses for Cognitive Grammar, chapters apply this framework to diverse text-types including poetry, narrative fiction, comics, press reports, political discourse and music, as well as exploring its potential for the teaching of language and literature in a range of contexts. Combining cutting-edge research in cognitive, critical and pedagogical stylistics, New Directions in Cognitive Grammar and Style showcases the latest developments in this field and offers new insights into our experiences of literary and non-literary texts by drawing on current understandings of language and cognition.

Shortlisted for the ESSE 2022 Book AwardsShortlisted for the 2022 SAES / AFEA Research PrizeBuilding on an upsurge of interest in the Americanisation of British novels triggered by the Harry Potter series, this book explores the various ways that British novels, from children’s fiction to travelogues and Book Prize winners, have been adapted and rewritten for the US market.Drawing on a vast corpus of over 80 works and integrating the latest research in multimodality and stylistics, Linda Pillière analyses the modifications introduced to make British English texts more culturally acceptable and accessible to the American English reader. From paratextual differences in cover, illustrations, typeface and footnotes to dialectal changes to lexis, tense, syntax and punctuation, Pillière explores the sociocultural and ideological pressures involved in intralingual translation and shows how the stylistic effects of such changes – including loss of meaning, voice, rhythm and word play – often result in a more muted American edition. In doing so, she reveals how homing in on numerous small adjustments can provide fascinating insights into the American publishing process and readership.

How do we experience poetry as readers? What is it in the text that provokes particular reactions, and how can we methodologically reveal these effects?Introducing an evidence-based approach to poetics, this book explores the psychological effects of poetic form and content, with an emphasis on how real readers respond to and experience poetry. Engaging with texts from diverse cultural and historical settings, it covers the basics of stylistic theory while at the same time outlining the specific methods required to categorize readers’ cognitive, emotional and attitudinal reactions. Chapters guide you through engaging experiments, covering key concepts such as significance, averages, deviation, outliers and reliability, and bring poetry to life by drawing on YouTube performances and musical renditions of the texts.With further readings, a glossary of key terms and ancillary resources providing an overview of research methodology, this book equips you with all the linguistic and analytical tools needed to uncover the psychological workings of poetry.

How do we experience poetry as readers? What is it in the text that provokes particular reactions, and how can we methodologically reveal these effects?Introducing an evidence-based approach to poetics, this book explores the psychological effects of poetic form and content, with an emphasis on how real readers respond to and experience poetry. Engaging with texts from diverse cultural and historical settings, it covers the basics of stylistic theory while at the same time outlining the specific methods required to categorize readers’ cognitive, emotional and attitudinal reactions. Chapters guide you through engaging experiments, covering key concepts such as significance, averages, deviation, outliers and reliability, and bring poetry to life by drawing on YouTube performances and musical renditions of the texts.With further readings, a glossary of key terms and ancillary resources providing an overview of research methodology, this book equips you with all the linguistic and analytical tools needed to uncover the psychological workings of poetry.

This book focuses on how readers can be ‘manipulated’ during their experience of reading fictional texts and how they are incited to perceive, process and interpret certain textual patterns. Offering fine-grained stylistic analysis of diverse genres, including crime fiction, short stories, poetry and novels, the book deciphers various linguistic, pragmatic and multimodal techniques. These are skilfully used by authors to achieve specific effects through a subtle manipulation of deixis, metalepsis, dialogue, metaphors, endings, inferences or rhetorical, narratorial and typographical control.Exploring contemporary texts such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Remains of the Day and We Need to Talk About Kevin, chapters delve into how readers are pragmatically positioned or cognitively (mis)directed as the author guides their attention and influences their judgment. They also show how readers’ responses can, conversely, bring about a certain form of manipulation as readers challenge the positions the texts invite them to occupy.

Over the last two decades, the study of discourse in film and television has become one of the most promising research avenues in stylistics and pragmatics due to the dazzling variety of source material and the huge pragmatic range within it. Meanwhile, with the advent of streaming and the box set, film and television themselves are becoming separated by an increasingly blurred line.This volume closes a long-standing gap in stylistics research, bringing together a book-level pragmastylistic showcase. It presents current developments from the field from two complementary perspectives, looking stylistically at the discourse in film and the discourse of and around film. This latter phrase comes to mean the approaches which try to account for the pragmatic effects induced by cinematography. This might be the camera work or the lighting, or the mise en scène or montage. The volume takes a multimodal approach, looking at word, movement and gesture, in keeping with modern stylistics.The volume shows how pragmatic themes and methods are adapted and applied to films, including speech acts, (im)politeness, implicature and context. In this way, it provides systematic insights into how meanings are displayed, enhanced, suppressed and negotiated in both film and televisual arts.

Metaperspectives in Contemporary Literary Fiction offers a literary-linguistic investigation of hypothesis and the metaperspective within contemporary Booker Prize-winning novels. This highly innovative book introduces a new concept in the field of stylistics , but it also explores it through analyses of highly relevant concepts and areas of stylistic study.Adam applies the concept of the metaperspective, centring on the thoughts of characters about other characters’ views of them, to contemporary works of literary fiction and aligns it with existing stylistic and narratological approaches to narrative point of view.Four recent winners of the Booker Prize – The Testaments (Margaret Atwood, 2019); Milkman (Anna Burns, 2018); A Brief History of Seven Killings (Marlon James, 2014); Lincoln in the Bardo (George Saunders, 2017) – figure as case-study novels. Each novel is tied to a specific iteration of the metaperspective, labelled respectively as the discourse-architectural metaperspective, the communal metaperspective, the racialised metaperspective, and the literalised metaperspective. These varieties of the metaperspective are linked to typical linguistic indices and thematic preoccupations within each of the novels under analysis. Discussions are further supported by consideration of other contemporary, Booker Prize-winning works. This original study of an entirely new concept within the disciplines of stylistics and narratology has enormous potential and value for the understanding of literary texts. The practical stylistic analyses are well grounded in existing scholarship, making use of concepts like empathy, point of view and reader positioning, all of which are current and important approaches to narrative texts.

Lesley Jeffries introduces a phenomenon which has not been given the attention it deserves - the contextual construction of oppositional meaning. These are opposites not recognisable as such out of context but that are clearly set up this way in the text concerned. The significance of oppositional meaning is well-known, and has been discussed by scholars for millennia, from Philosophy to Politics. But the main emphasis has always been on the conventional opposite: the opposite recognised by lexical semantics. Starting from socio-cultural viewpoints, moving to original research and then concluding with a new theoretical formulation, this book introduces and consolidates a significant new approach to the analysis of oppositional meaning. It closes with a discussion of the importance of constructed opposition in hegemonic practice and makes a case for the inclusion of opposition as a central tool of critical discourse analysis. It will be essential reading for researchers and graduates in stylistics, linguistics and language studies.

I. A. Richards is an influential figure in literary criticism but has rarely been thought of as someone who laid the foundations for cognitive stylistics. This book proposes that Richards was a "protocognitivist".West argues that Richards anticipated many of the discipline's core aims, methods and assumptions. The book argues that the roots of cognitive psychology lie in early 20th-century psychology, when there was a focus on cognitive processes such as memory and learning, attention, categorisation, perception and consciousness. It was this cognitive psychology that Richards drew upon to build a theory of literature and interpretation - which in itself prefigured cognitive stylistics.West also suggests that Richards is one of the more influential British intellectuals of the 20th century, and that his work is still relevant today. West argues that cognitive stylistics is not, as Peter Stockwell has written, a "new science of literature and reading", but rather a discipline with a history that it continues to deny itself.This book will appeal to researchers and advanced students in stylistics and literary studies.

This innovative volume testifies to the current revived interest in Shakespeare's language and style and opens up new and captivating vistas of investigation. Transcending old boundaries between literary and linguistic studies, this engaging collaborative book comes up with an original array of theoretical approaches and new findings. The chapters in the collection capture a rich diversity of points of view and cover such fields as lexicography, versification, dramaturgy, rhetorical analyses, cognitive and computational corpus-based stylistic studies, offering a holistic vision of Shakespeare's uses of language. The perspective is deliberately broad, confronting ideas and visions at the intersection of various techniques of textual investigation. Such novel explorations of Shakespeare's multifarious artistry and amazing inventiveness in his use of language will cater for a broad range of readers, from undergraduates, postgraduates, scholars and researchers, to poetry and theatre lovers alike.

This book is a stylistic study of D. H. Lawrence's presentation of narrative viewpoint.  The focus is mainly on Lawrence's third novel, Sons and Lovers, occupying a crucial position in his oeuvre and judged by critics to be his first mature piece.While sharing many features typical of nineteenth-century novels, it marks the emergence of a new technique of writing consciousness that functioned as a precursor to the modernist practice of dialogic shifts across viewpoints.  Through a detailed linguistic analysis, Sotirova shows that different characters' viewpoints are not simply juxtaposed in the narrative, but linked in a way that creates dialogic resonances between them.  The dialogic linking is achieved through the use of devices that have parallel functions in conversational discourse - referring expressions, sentence-initial correctives and repetition.  The book uses stylistics to resolve current controversies in narratology and Lawrence criticism.In approaching the study of narrative viewpoint from the angle of discourse, Sotirova arrives at cutting-edge insights into Lawrence's work.  This book will be required reading for stylisticians, narratologists, literary linguists and literary studies scholars.

This book is a stylistic study of D. H. Lawrence's presentation of narrative viewpoint. The focus is mainly on Lawrence's third novel, Sons and Lovers, occupying a crucial position in his oeuvre and judged by critics to be his first mature piece.While sharing many features typical of nineteenth-century novels, it marks the emergence of a new technique of writing consciousness that functioned as a precursor to the modernist practice of dialogic shifts across viewpoints. Through a detailed linguistic analysis, Sotirova shows that different characters' viewpoints are not simply juxtaposed in the narrative, but linked in a way that creates dialogic resonances between them. The dialogic linking is achieved through the use of devices that have parallel functions in conversational discourse - referring expressions, sentence-initial correctives and repetition. The book uses stylistics to resolve current controversies in narratology and Lawrence criticism.In approaching the study of narrative viewpoint from the angle of discourse, Sotirova arrives at cutting-edge insights into Lawrence's work.This book will be required reading for stylisticians, narratologists, literary linguists and literary studies scholars.

Roberta Piazza's book is a linguistic investigation of the dialogue of Italian cinema covering a selection of films from the 1950s to the present day. It looks at how speech is dealt with in studies of the cinema and tackles the lack of engagement with dialogue in film studies. It explores the representation of discourse in cinema -- the way particular manifestations of verbal interaction are reproduced in film. Whereas representation generally refers to the language used in texts to assign meaning to a group and its social practices, here discourse representation more directly refers to the relationship between real-life and cinematic discourse. Piazza analyses how fictional dialogue reinterprets authentic interaction in order to construe particular meanings. Beginning by exploring the relationship between discourse and genre, the second half of the book takes a topic-based approach and reflects on the themes of narrative and identity. The analysis carried out takes on board the multi-semiotic and multimodal components of film discourse. The book uses also uses concepts and methodologies from pragmatics, conversation analysis and discourse analysis.

This book offers a global exploration of current theory and practice in the teaching of stylistics and the implementation of stylistic techniques in teaching other subjects. Pedagogical stylistics is a field that looks at employing stylistic analysis in teaching, with the aim of enabling students to better understand literature, language and also improving their language acquisition. It is also concerned with the best practice in teaching stylistics. The book discusses a broad range of interrelated topics including hypertext, English as a Foreign Language, English as a Second Language, poetry, creative writing, and metaphor. Leading experts offer focused, empirical studies on specific developments, providing in-depth examinations of both theoretical and practical teaching methods. This interdisciplinary approach covers linguistics and literature from the perspective of current pedagogical methodology, moving from general tertiary education to more specific EFL and ESL teaching. The role of stylistics in language acquisition is currently underexplored.This contemporary collection provides academics and practitioners with the most up to date trends in pedagogical stylistics and delivers analyses of a diverse range of teaching methods.

Written over the last thirty years, this collection of Professor Peter Verdonk’s most important work on the stylistics of poetry clearly shows that the stylistics of poetic discourse is a diverse and valuable interdiscipline. Discussing the poetry of Auden, Heaney and Larkin amongst many others, Verdonk covers everything from intrinsic textual meaning and external context in its widest sense to the reader’s cognitive and emotive response to poems. The book will appeal to all students on stylistics and literary linguistics courses, especially those focussing on poetry and poetic language.

Written over the last thirty years, this collection of Professor Peter Verdonk’s most important work on the stylistics of poetry clearly shows that the stylistics of poetic discourse is a diverse and valuable interdiscipline. Discussing the poetry of Auden, Heaney and Larkin amongst many others, Verdonk covers everything from intrinsic textual meaning and external context in its widest sense to the reader’s cognitive and emotive response to poems. The book will appeal to all students on stylistics and literary linguistics courses, especially those focussing on poetry and poetic language.