ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author uses the occasion of an analysis of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as an opportunity for addressing those issues afresh. Stylistics has long led an uneasy half-life, never fully accepted, for many related reasons, by either linguists or literary critics. Linguists are often sceptical of stylistics because they are less interested in explaining particular individual texts than in developing general theories, and there is no convincing theory of text-types within which a theory of literary texts might be situated. Comparative corpus methods now allow us to study how far texts consist of recurrent phrasal patterns which are widespread in the language as a whole. In some ways, the language of Heart of Darkness deviates from the norm of everyday language use, but many recurrent phrases are significant because they exploit the routine phraseology of the language.
