ABSTRACT
Stanley Fish's continued saturation bombing of stylistics - the phrase is Barbara Herrnstein Smith's, but he proudly adopts it at the beginning of 'What is stylistics and why are they saying such terrible things about itT (1980, part 11: 247) - has, it seems to me, the unexpected and so far unexploited effect of suggesting a way to reconstruct what stylistics would have been like in earlier periods. Fish's argument, it will be remembered, is that
formal patterns are themselves the products of interpretation and that therefore there is no such thing as a formal pattern, at least in the sense necessary for the practice of stylistics: that is, no pattern that one can observe before interpretation is hazarded and which therefore can be used to prefer one interpretation to another.
