ABSTRACT

First published in 1992, this wide-ranging collection of essays focuses on the principle of contextualisation as it applies to the interpretation, description, theorising and reading of literary and non-literary texts. The collection aims to reveal the interdependencies between theory, analysis, text and context by challenging the myth that stylistics entails a fundamental separation of text from context, linguistic description from descriptive interpretation, or language from situation. The essays cover a historically diverse set of texts, from Puttenham to Colemanballs, and a number of language-sensitive topics such as post-modernism, irony, newspaper representations, gender and narrative.

part |5 pages

Part I Situated fashions of speaking and writing: from nonsense to common sense

part |4 pages

Part III Positioning styles: framing women in language

part |4 pages

Part IV Styles of incongruity: the pragmatics of oddness and daftness