Essential study guides for the future linguist. The Language of Literature is a general introduction to the methods and principles behind stylistics. It is suitable for advanced level students and beyond. Written with input from the Cambridge English Corpus, it provides students with an introduction to stylistics with texts from different genres. It takes the approach that the best way to study literary texts is to focus closely on language. Using short activities to help explain analysis methods, this book guides students through major modern issues and concepts. It summarises key concerns and findings, while providing inspiration for language investigations and non-examined assessments (NEAs) with research suggestions.

Essays discuss realism, futurism, Dada, the grammar of poetry, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Yeats, Turgenev, Pasternak, Blake, and semiotic theory.

There is a marked awareness about the language of literature and its meaning both in Indian and Western aesthetic thinking. The aestheticians of both schools hold that the language of literature embodies a significant aspect of human experience, and represents a creative pattern of verbal structure to impart meaning effectively. Modern Western aesthetic thinking, which includes theories like formalism, new criticism, stylistics, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, discourse analysis, semiotics and dialogic criticism, in one way or another emphasizes the study of the language of literature in order to understand its meaning. Similarly, there is a distinct focus on the language of literature and its meaning in Indian literary theories which include the theory of rasa (aesthetic experience), alaṁkāra (the poetic figure), rīti (diction), dhvani (suggestion), vakrokti (oblique expression) and aucitya (propriety). This book explores how the language of literature and its meaning have been dealt with in both Indian and Western aesthetic thinking. In doing so, the study concentrates on Kuntaka’s theory of vakrokti and Ānandavardhana’s theory of dhvani in Indian aesthetic thinking and Russian formalism and deconstruction in Western thinking. The book categorically focuses on the intersection between the theory of vakrokti and Russian formalism and the meeting-point between the theory of dhvani and deconstruction.

Table of contents

Over a period of over forty years, Geoffrey Leech has made notable contributions to the field of literary stylistics, using the interplay between linguistic form and literary function as a key to the ‘mystery’ of how a text comes to be invested with artistic potential. In this book, seven earlier papers and articles, read previously only by a restricted audience, have been brought together with four new chapters, the whole volume showing a continuity of approach across a period when all too often literary and linguistic studies have appeared to drift further apart. Leech sets the concept of ‘foregrounding’ (also known as defamiliarization) at the heart of the interplay between form and interpretation. Through practical and insightful examination of how poems, plays and prose works produce special meaning, he counteracts the ‘flight from the text’ that has characterized thinking about language and literature in the last thirty years, when the response of the reader, rather than the characteristics and meaning potential of the text itself, have been given undue prominence. The book provides an enlightening analysis of well-known (as well as less well-known) texts of great writers of the past, including Keats, Shelley, Samuel Johnson, Shaw, Dylan Thomas, and Virginia Woolf.

A collection of papers revealing the boundary between linguistic and literary approaches to classical texts.

The aim of this book is to explain style in terms which do not presuppose too extensive an acquaintaince on the part of the reader with linguistic terminology. Its orientation is not basically theoretical. It attempts to provide help in a pragmatic way for those who recognize the importance of language in literature, but who do not know where to start or how to exploit the particular knowledge and skills the possess.