ABSTRACT
Style is the fi fth and fi nal affective input in literary reading that we will look at. Of all the phenomena discussed thus far, style can be said to be the most textual, or sign-fed, of all. The main questions that I will explore in this chapter include: (i) Can literary style evoke and channel emotion? (ii) Are there certain style and grammar elements that can be termed “distal” that might help this process? And, most perhaps contentious of all, (iii) Can certain aspects of style be viewed as initially mind-fed. By this, I mean can highly skeletal echoes of previous styles, structures and rhythms that have affected a reader in the past be subconsciously channelled and brought to bear on concrete sign-fed, textual aspects of style during engaged acts of literary reading. In order to explore all this, let us fi rst set out some background by looking at emotion in three related contexts, namely, those of general linguistics, stylistics and rhythm.
