ABSTRACT
This chapter establishes the general theoretical and methodological framework for a multimodal stylistics of the novel and hence for the rest of the book. It first introduces the academic fields of stylistics and social semiotic multimodal theory, including prominent scholars and work in the fields, as well as core concepts and ideas. The chapter then moves on to synthesising the two fields into what is the main contribution of the book, i.e. the development of a comprehensive framework for social semiotic multimodal stylistics. This part of the chapter presents a) the rationale behind developing a new branch of stylistics; b) challenges and criticism of the field; and c) a brief survey of work that has been done in multimodal stylistics so far and of work that belongs to different theoretical paradigms yet shares its object of analysis (i.e. multimodal aspects of the novel) with the present study. The last section presents further methodological considerations, including the categorisation of novels in terms of their multimodality, reflections about the extended notion of “text” which is entailed by the study, the selection of analytical material and issues pertaining to the question of how to present the multimodal material under scrutiny.
