Stylistics

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

Peter Gerald Crisp (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
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  • The Literary Encyclopedia. WORLD HISTORY AND IDEAS: A CROSS-CULTURAL VOLUME.

Many people still think of stylistics as consisting of the study of the surface features of language, such as the distribution of sound patterns, grammatical constructions, and vocabulary types, in order to identify or characterize a given style, whether that of an author, a genre, a period or an individual text. While something like this might have been an adequate, or partially adequate, characterization of stylistics fifty or sixty years ago, it is not at all adequate now. The concern with surface stylistic features persists, of course, but contemporary stylistics is concerned above all with how those features are interpreted by the minds of readers, with how, by starting from those linguistic features as indications and prompts, …

3805 words

Citation: Crisp, Peter Gerald. "Stylistics". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 15 July 2010 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1227, accessed 23 November 2024.]

1227 Stylistics 2 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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