Introduction

In a paper published in 1960 Roman Jakobson made a statement about the relationship between linguistics and literary studies which has been cited in almost every subsequent book on the subject. This book is no exception:

If there are some critics who still doubt the competence of linguistics to embrace the field of poetics, I privately believe that the poetic incompetence of some bigoted linguists has been mistaken for an inadequacy of the linguistic science itself. All of us here, however, definitely realize that a linguist deaf to the poetic function of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistic problems and unconversant with linguistic methods are equally flagrant anachronisms. (Jakobson, 1960:377)

In the intervening years Jakobson’s call has echoed in roughly the same form in many communities of linguists and literary critics. Many chose not to heed the call or, indeed, chose not to listen in the first place; and at times the decision of the non-listeners looks to have been a wise one, for the relationship between these two disciplines has been uneasy and is still fraught with all kinds of theoretical and practical difficulties. An introduction such as this cannot be the place to chart such difficulties in any real detail, but it does help to put the present volume in context if we attempt to review some of the main landmarks in the field of stylistics during the past twenty-five years or so. In so doing, we cannot avoid exploring the nature of the interface between linguistics and literature.