ABSTRACT

This collection of original research highlights the legacy of Michael Toolan’s pioneering contributions to the field of stylistics and in so doing provides a critical overview of the ways in which language, text, and context are analyzed in the field and its related disciplines. Featuring work from an international range of contributors, the book illustrates how the field of stylistics has evolved in the 25 years since the publication of Toolan’s seminal Language, Text and Context, which laid the foundation for the analysis of the language and style in literary texts. The volume demonstrates how technological innovations and the development of new interdisciplinary methodologies, including those from corpus, cognitive, and multimodal stylistics, point to the greater degree of interplay between language, text, and context exemplified in current research and how this dynamic relationship can be understood by featuring examples from a variety of texts and media. Underscoring the significance of Michael Toolan’s extensive work in the field in the evolution of literary linguistic research, this volume is key reading for students and researchers in stylistics, discourse studies, corpus linguistics, and interdisciplinary literary studies.

chapter 1|14 pages

Introduction

Language, Text and Context Revisited

section Section 1|45 pages

Plots and Progression

chapter 3|14 pages

La La Land

Counterfactuality, Disnarration and the Forked (Motorway) Path

section Section 2|83 pages

Patterns and Predictions

chapter 5|16 pages

Investigating Syntactic Simplicity in Popular Fiction

A Corpus Stylistics Approach

chapter 6|24 pages

‘We work hard here’

Exploring Person and Place Deixis in a Corpus of Historical Migrant Letters

chapter 7|20 pages

The Devil Has All the Best Tunes

An Investigation of the Lexical Phenomenon of Brexit

chapter 8|21 pages

Corpus Stylistics, Norms and Comparisons

Studying Speech in Great Expectations

section Section 3|62 pages

Pragmatics and Perception

chapter 9|17 pages

‘Intending to Mean, Pretending to Be’

Reflections on the Limits on Genre

chapter 10|13 pages

Indeterminacy and Interpretation

What Is Shown and What Is Hidden in Michael Haneke’s Caché

chapter 11|14 pages

Reliability, Unreliability, Reader Manipulation and Plot Reversals

Strategies for Constructing and Challenging the Credibility of Characters in Agatha Christie’s Detective Fiction

chapter 12|16 pages

Metaphoric Interpretations of a Short Story by J. D. Salinger

A Reader-Response Study

section Section 4|60 pages

Projection and Positioning

chapter 14|12 pages

Quotation and Overhearing in Austen

chapter 15|17 pages

Suppression, Silencing and Failure to Project

Ways of Losing Voice While Using It

chapter 16|13 pages

‘Hey YouTube’

Positioning the Viewer in Vlogs

section Section 5|54 pages

Politics

chapter 17|17 pages

The Value of Intertextual Association

How GM Technologies Are Given Value Through Association

chapter 18|17 pages

Public Women

Power, Gender and Semiotic Representations