ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author takes a broad historical view of the development of close verbal analysis of literary texts, leading the reader through some key positions in twentieth-century textual analysis by extracting from his classic Language of Fiction. Both the virtues and the limitations of Continental stylistics can be traced in its origins. It developed rapidly after the First World War, to fill a vacuum existing in the humanities in Europe between, on the on the one hand, a dryly academic philology preoccupied with the formulation of laws to explain phonological and semantic change. Modern stylistics has addressed itself to several interrelated tasks: to clarify the concept of style, to establish for 'style' a central place in the study of literature, and to develop more precise, inclusive, and objective methods of describing style than the impressionistic generalizations of traditional criticism.
