The State of Stylistics contains a broad collection of papers that investigate how stylistics has evolved throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In so doing, it considers how stylisticians currently perceive their own respective fields of enquiry. It also defines what stylistics is, and how we might use it in research and teaching.

"This book represents an excellent snapshot of the discipline of stylistics in all its range. As well as theoretical positioning by some key figures in the field, it covers the main dimensions of cognitive, computational and discoursal approaches to literary stylistics, and it does not neglect the practical pedagogy that is the artisanal bedrock of the discipline. There is valuable work here that showcases the international reach of stylistics." Professor Peter Stockwell, School of English Studies, University of Nottingham

Contents: Notes on Contributors

Preface

Part I: Theoretical Outlooks

Mick Short: ‘“Where are you going to my pretty maid?” “For detailed analysis”, sir, she said.’

Geoff Hall: A Grammarian's Funeral: On Browning, Post-Structuralism, and the State of Stylistics

Patricia Kolaiti: On Genuine Interdisciplinarity: Articulating Poetics as Theory

Ken Ireland: Trewe Love at Solentsea? Stylistics Vs. Narratology in Thomas Hardy

Nazan Tutas: Who Is Afraid of Stylistics? Postgraduate Students’ Responses to Stylistics

Part II: Cognitive Stylistics

Shun-liang Chao: Fusion Style: Towards a Poetics of the Grotesque Body

Ulf Cronquist: Donald Barthelme’s Art of Storytelling: A Cognitive-Semiotic Textual Analysis of ‘On the Deck,’ ‘At the Tolstoy Museum’ and ‘The Baby’ Alfonsina Scarinzi: Evoking Interest, Evoking Meaning: The Literary Theme and the Cognitive Function of Stylistic Devices

Katerina Vassilopoulou: ‘Why Get Upset Over a Few Cases of Rhinoceritis?’: Possible Worlds in the Theatre of the Absurd

Part III: Corpus Stylistics

Vadim Andreev: A Multivariate Study of Style Differences in Poetry

Maria Cristina Consiglio: e-Lears: a Corpus Approach to Shakespeare and Tate Yu-fang HO: Measuring Text Similarity Between the Two Editions of John Fowles’s The Magus

Merja KYTÖ and Suzanne ROMAINE: ‘My Dearest Minnykins’: Style, Gender and Affect in 19th Century English Letters

Part IV: Pragmatics and Discourse Stylistics

Simon Borchmann: Functional Stylistics and Peripeteic Texts

Anne Furlong: You Can’t Put Your Foot in the Same River Once: Relevance Stylistics and Rereading

Robert A. Troyer: Dialogue and Discourse Structure: A Speech Move Analysis of Sherman Alexie’s Story ‘What You Pawn I Will Redeem’

Judit Zerkowitz: Stylistic Analysis of Discoursal Identity Formation in Biographic Interviews with Two Senior Teachers of English in Hungary

Part V: Stylistics in the Classroom

Kyoko Arai: The Ellipsis of Haiku: The Effects of Poetic Ellipsis in the Framework of Relevance Theory

Emma Dawson: Emotion Tracking Pedagogy: Towards Better Teaching of the National Curriculum for English

Sarala Krishnamurthy: Real People or Verbal Constructs: A Stylistic Analysis of Character in Fiction

Nicola Lennon: Just for Laughs: The Construction of Nonverbal Humour

Ken Nakagawa: On the Phrase ‘Even with a Weight of Pleasure’ in The Prelude (Bk 2, 178)

Rachel S. Toddington: (Im)Politeness in Dramatic Dialogue: Understanding Face-Attack in Shakespeare’s Othello

Simon Zupan: Mind-Style, Modality, and Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ Bibliography

Index