I present a posthumanist approach to literary interpretation using stylistic analysis. It is posthumanist since i) digital cameras/audio-video resources and editing applications prompt multimodal r...

Studies on Niger Delta (ND) poetry have applied stylistic and discourse analyses in exploring the metaphorical elements of the deplorable ecological condition of the region, but how these elements ...

This paper examines the manifestation of individual style through the lens of a specific language category: the interjection. The analysis considers how interjections are used as a resource in the ...

This article investigates power dynamics reflected in the conversations between characters in Arthur Miller’s written text, A View from the Bridge, from the perspective of pragmatic stylistics. Giv...

As one of the master stylists of our time, John Banville has honed his own unique style of writing. The typical Banville novel is a first-person confessional narrative of an aging male character tr...

Most stylistic analyses of literary texts begin with the text proper, largely ignoring the paratextual elements that precede it. The extent of this lacuna within stylistics is so great that a searc...

This article presents a new model of humour that can be used in the successful analysis of how and why literature can be found humorous. It deconstructs the theory that the perception of incongruit...

Geoff Hall took degrees separately in English literature and in applied linguistics at the universities of Sussex and Birmingham, respectively. A career in English teaching of all kinds has taken h...

Paul Simpson got his PhD from the University of Ulster in 1984 and took up a post at the University of Nottingham the same year. He has since worked at Queen’s University Belfast and Liverpool Univ...

Mick Short is Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at Lancaster University, UK. He studied English at the University of Lancaster from 1965, just one year after the university firs...

Katie Wales was Professor of English Language at Royal Holloway College, University of London, before moving to the University of Leeds to become Professor of Modern English Language. She later mov...

This article represents the first illustration of the tools of disability stylistics on a literary text. It does so by examining the representation of blindness in an extract from Robert Louis Stev...

While stylistics has successfully integrated the study of language use in film and television, relatively little research has tried to systematically classify the functions of television or film di...

The use of the present tense as the primary narrative tense has become a commonly encountered phenomenon in contemporary fiction. The textual effects of the use of the present narrative tense, howe...

‘A Mother’ by Joyce tells of Mrs. Kearney’s effort in enhancing her daughter’s musical reputation during the Irish Revival, revolving around a conflict between Mrs. Kearney and a male-dominated gro...

The representation of fictional minds that work in idiosyncratic ways has received significant attention in the past few decades, particularly regarding characters with some form of developmental d...

In November of last year, the stylistics community was saddened to learn of the death of Professor Dr Peter Verdonk, eminent stylistician, editorial board member of Language and Literature and long-time member of the Poetics and Linguistics Association. Peter was an incisive critic, a first-class linguist and a very kind man. As a token of respect for our dear colleague and friend, Peter’s influential

This article aims to provide a stylistically founded model of pathetic fallacy (PF hereafter). Pathetic fallacy is a Romantic literary technique used in art and literature to convey emotions throug...

This article uses a theoretical framework of possible worlds to explore the ways in which Janice Galloway’s novel about grief and depression, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, may elicit emotional re...

This article analyses the degree to which readers report a perceived sense of closeness to the events depicted in ‘Belgium’, the opening story of Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone. Theoretically, I draw on Ronald Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, which models language primarily through its notion of construal, an aspect of which claims that -ing forms impose an internal perspective on a scene that results

This article presents a pedagogical stylistics of intertextuality in interactive literary study talk. It analyses case study data representing one higher education seminar discussion, where a tutor and student interpret a focal text through reference to diverse intertexts. The article asks: How do participants enact intertextual literary analysis in conversation? How are intertextual voices introduced

Catchphrases have long been a hallmark of US-American sit-coms and dramas, as well as reality, game and variety show programming. Because the phenomenon of the television catchphrase developed throughout the era of network, commercial broadcasting under Federal Communications Commission guidelines regulating profanity in network television, catchphrases traditionally have not included swear words.

Despite all the attention Puritan sermons have received, no attention has been specifically devoted to the analysis of the two speech acts of blessing and cursing in these sermons from a cognitive-pragmatic point of view. This study aims at doing this, focussing on Winthrop’s A Modell of Christian Charity as a case study. I use the framework provided by the Entrenchment and Conventionalization Model

Present-tense narration has become a prevalent narrative style in English literature over the past few decades. This narrative style tended to be considered unnatural and odd in narrative theory in the late twentieth century (Cohn, 1999; Fludernik, 1996), since using the present tense to describe events at the story level of narrative was regarded as incongruous with the traditional story-telling convention

Josefine Mutzenbacher oder die Geschichte einer Wienerischen Dirne von ihr selbst erzählt, published in Vienna in 1906, represents one of the most fascinating cases of attribution of authorship in German literature. Although Josefine Mutzenbacher is usually attributed to Felix Salten, the author of the world-famous Bambi (1923), the novel’s authorship has never been confirmed, and many other candidates

Genre definitions by Swales (1990) and Miller (1984) include the communicative purpose of a text as an indicative feature of its genre. Genre studies have also identified how expert members of discourse communities possess professional expertise in genre styles. This article shows that beyond discourse community expert members, ordinary audiences also have conceptions of genre and use those conceptions

Learning a foreign language provides an entry point into the lives of cultural ‘others’, as does the reading of realistic fiction. Responding to the challenges of both tasks requires concerted cognitive effort, but also creativity. First, individuals need to override the automatic tendency to prioritise their own point of view and then, at least temporarily, imagine themselves into another’s position

This article studies the popular children’s book The Gruffalo (1999) written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler. Its popularity is attested to by the fact that the book has sold over 13.5 million copies and has been translated into more than 80 different languages. The question that this article seeks to address is, to what extent has the language and style of The Gruffalo played

Despite the importance of child characters in the novels of Charles Dickens, his association with children’s literature is often forgotten, and his A Child’s History of England, first published in instalments in his journal Household Words ( January 1851 to December 1853), has frequently been ignored by critics. The aim of this article is to re-evaluate its achievement as an extended piece of story-telling

In this paper, we study gendered patterns of body language descriptions in children’s fiction. We compare a corpus of 19th-century children’s literature with a corpus of contemporary fiction for children. Using a corpus linguistic approach, we study gendered five-word body part clusters, that is, repeated sequences of words that contain at least one body part noun and a marker of gender. Our aim is

In the field of children’s literature studies, much attention has been devoted to investigating differences between children’s and adult literature. Works of crosswriters, authors who write for both readerships in different works, are an excellent source for this research. This article applies stylometry, the computational method of analysing style, to the oeuvres of 10 Dutch and English crosswriters

This article constitutes an introduction to the five articles that appear in this special issue. This framing process starts by highlighting the sparse, yet important, work that has been conducted over the past 20 years on children’s literature in the field of stylistics. The focus in the article then turns to a more general discussion on the language of children’s literature. Here, in this chronological

This article introduces a test for literary text comprehension in university students of English as a second language. Poetry is especially suited for our purpose since it frequently shows features that offer challenges to comprehension in a limited space. An example is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43, on which our test is based: it is suited for assessing not only if a text has been understood but also the

The present study adopts a corpus stylistic approach to: (1) examine a relationship between textual patterns of colour words in The Great Gatsby and their symbolic interpretations and (2) investigate the ways those patterns are handled in Thai translations. Distribution and co-occurrence patterns were analysed for colour words that are key in the novel: white, grey, yellow and lavender. The density

Interaction between text and reader is a prominent concern in stylistics. This paper focusses on interactions among stylistic processes and subconscious microcognitive processes that generate changes to narrative and interpretation during reading. Drawing on process philosophy and recent neuroscientific research, I articulate this dynamism through analysis of a brief narrative moment from each of The

The present study combines literary theory and cognitive psychology to empirically explore some cognitive and emotional facets of poetry reading, exemplified by the reading of three Shakespeare sonnets. Specifically, predictions generated combining quantitative textual analysis according to the Neurocognitive Poetics model with qualitative textual analysis based on the Foregrounding assessment Matrix

When I signed off the previous ‘Year’s work’ article I naively looked forward to a year ahead of restored travel to international conferences and other trappings of the ‘old normal’. Instead it has been another year of Zooming here and Teaming there and e-books and e-learning. All of this has brought such disruption and steep learning curves that, even amongst the few positives which academics may

This article reports on some of the results of a project undertaken by researchers at the University of Sheffield with The National Trust in the UK, which seeks to examine the discourse found in guestbooks located in the Trust’s holiday rental cottages. Our key interests lie in the ways in which holidaymakers perform particular identities through the stylistic choices they make when writing entries

This paper explores the pervasiveness of features of orality in the language of performed fiction. Features of orality are typical of spontaneous spoken conversations where they are the result of the ongoing planning process and the interaction between the interlocutors, but they also occur in the context of performed fiction (movies and plays) and in narrative fiction (e.g. novels). In these contexts

This article confronts the theoretical tenets of reader-oriented short story collection theory and its implications for a literary analysis of Benni’s Il bar sotto il mare (1987) with the results of an empirical study of 12 readers. Through free recall tasks and open questions, we collected their recall of stories, specific passages, recurring topics and general interpretation to assess the processes

beat poets, Dante and Petrarch, and the Confessions of St Augustine. All this of course establishes Dylan as a major artist. In contrast to these three dominant approaches to Dylan’s work, then, Hampton’s approach consists in exploring how ‘songs are made and how specific literary and musical techniques work to generate particular manifestations of style in song’ (p. 13). This emphasis on ‘style’ is

Joe Blann’s (2011) comic ‘Things We had’ is a complex and nuanced multimodal realisation of a tense interaction between a couple, rendered through the subtle interplay of narration, panel composition and dialogue. The tug of war and blame game the couple engage in are rife with instances of impoliteness. Drawing on Culpeper’s (2011a, 2015b) impoliteness framework and an integrative pragmatics approach

This article examines direct address, or ‘breaking the fourth wall’, in the BBC TV series Fleabag. It applies Text World Theory to telecinematic discourse for the first time and, in doing so, contributes to developing cognitive approaches in the field of telecinematic stylistics. Text World Theory, originally a cognitive linguistic discourse processing framework, is used to examine how multimodal cues

Previous scholarship on Jane Austen has often commented on the moral overtones of her lexical choices; more specifically, the fact that “incorrect” lexical innovations and fashionable words (i.e. new usages) tend to be deployed as part of the idiolect of foolish, gullible or morally reprehensible characters. By contrast, ethically sound characters normally move within the limits of established (‘old’)

The metrical theory devised by Eduard Sievers and refined by A. J. Bliss forms the basis for most current scholarship on Old English meter. A weakness of the Sievers–Bliss theory is that it occupies a middle ground between two levels of analytic description, distinguished by Roman Jakobson in an influential article as ‘verse instance’ and ‘verse design’. Metrists in the Sievers–Bliss tradition employ

‘six word stories’ (stories told in six words), young adult fiction such as Twilight, literary classics such as Shakespearian plays, TV series like How I Met Your Mother, and other narratives such as the Marvel Universe, amongst others. This shows that the framework is adaptable to any narrative and is not exclusive to literature: it is up to the reader to connect those narratives through their ‘mental

Framed by cognitive-poetic and possible worlds theories, this article explores two 21st century novels by the British postmodernist author Ian McEwan. Building upon Ryan’s (1991) seminal conceptualisation of the theory in relation to literature and using the novels as case studies, possible worlds theory is used to explain the unique and destabilising stylistic effects at play in the texts, which result

The late linguist M.A.K. Halliday described the last paragraph of Darwin’s Origin of Species, with its description of a tangled bank, as one of the most remarkable paragraphs in the whole of literature. Yet it appears marred by an obvious grammatical mistake. In this article, we seek to show that the apparent mistake is actually the vestige of a now extinct form of paragraph in which the structure

This article furthers the somewhat underdeveloped area of research regarding the consideration of complex theoretical concepts such as postmodernism and metafiction in relation to children’s literature by concentrating on a stunningly complex—although by no means rare—experimental text aimed at 8–12 year-olds. Using The Secret Series by Pseudonymous Bosch as example, I examine how children’s literature

This article extends the author’s theory of multilevel grounding in meaning generation from its original application to music to the domains of visual cognition and poetry. Based on the notions of ground from the philosophy of language and conceptual blending from cognitive linguistics, the approach views semiosis in works of art as a series of successive mappings couched in a set of six hierarchical

The article discusses the morality of W. B. Yeats’ sonnet Leda and the Swan in the context of a widening gap between the sexual mores of earlier times and our own, and whether the poem remains a suitable choice for the teaching of stylistics. I begin by examining stylistics treatments of the poem, and its political, social and artistic context, then move on to consider charges of misogyny against the

The representation of non-standard and regional accent and dialect in literary fiction has been framed mainly sociolinguistically and treated as an index of authenticity, within an account of characterisation. The reader’s attitude to such speakers in literary fiction is manipulated narratorially and authorially. Since readerly effects, impressions and evaluations are the key issues involved, it seems

This article considers the construction of the profilers and criminals in Thomas Harris’ (2013) [1988] novel Silence of the Lambs through the analysis of selected indicative criminal mind-related extracts. The aim is to consider such characters’ construction through analysis of schematic incongruity, conversational power play, language depicting the actual fictional criminal viewpoint and, lastly,

This paper will develop a cognitive stylistic framework drawn from Conceptual Integration (Blending) Theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002), and Text World Theory, which uses the idea of elaboration sites as potential structural enablers in mapping across blend spaces. The framework will be used to investigate the operation of allegory and metaphor in Emma Purhouse’s poem ‘Flamingos in Dudley Zoo’. Previous

This article describes how teaching in a second-year undergraduate stylistics workshop was transformed in my attempt to increase student attendance and engagement, and the strategies that were put in place to achieve this outcome. The personal account describes how I changed my teaching pedagogy to facilitate learning through collaborative strategies and how I evaluated the impact this had on student