PALA Papers – serie

This volume of articles comprises papers from the 25th annual conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA), which was held at the University of Huddersfield, England, in July 2005. The theme of the conference was ‘Stylistics and Social Cognition’, and as usual at a PALA conference, this theme was interpreted very widely by the participants, as the reader of this book will no doubt conclude.At the heart of this volume, there is something of a reaction against the cognitive developments in stylistics, which might be seen as being in danger of privileging the individual interpretation of literature over something more social. The concern is to consider whether there is a more collective approach that could be taken to the meaning of text, and whether recent insights from cognitive stylistics could work with this idea of collectivity to define something we might call ‘commonality’ of meaning in texts.Stylistics and Social Cognition will be of interest to those working in stylistics and other text-analytic fields such as critical discourse analysis and those concerned with notions of interpretation, collective meaning and human communication.

Stylistics: Prospect & Retrospect looks backward toward classic and foundational approaches and texts that helped to establish the field of stylistics. It also looks forward by examining recent innovations that seem likely to alter the ways in which style is studied in the years to come. The essays presented here, written by an array of experts from nine countries on four continents, employ a wide range of approaches to works that range from romantic poetry to contemporary fiction and from traditional folktales and nursery rhymes to contemporary film. The variety of authors, approaches, and works found here testifies to the vitality of the field of stylistics, and these essays should appeal to all those interested in the nature of style and in the history and future of stylistics.