Stylistics Case Study

2. A. 1: History of Stylistics:

According to Crystal and Davy, “Style may refer to some or all of the language habits of one person as when we talk of Shakespeare’s style (or styles)… or when we discuss the question of disputed authorship… More often, it refers in this way to a selection of language habits, the occasional linguistic idiosyncrasies which characterize an individual’s uniqueness.

….style may refer to some or all of the language habits shared by a group of people at one time, or over a period of time, as when we talk about the style of Augustan poets, the style Old English ‘heroic’ poetry, the style in which civil service forms are written, or styles of public-speaking”. (Crystal & Davy 1969, 9-10)

Stylistics is the study of ‘style’.

‘General Stylistics’ (Sebeok 1960) was interested in all forms of language text, spoken and written, distinguished from the sub-field of literary stylistics. Early stylistics was dominated by linguistic structuralism, which emphasized the structural properties of texts at different levels of linguistic organization (phonological, grammatical, lexical, and prosodic). It gloried in the technical sophistication of linguistic description, at a time when linguistics was still developing momentum. Stylistics was largely based on taxonomies – lists of language features, levels and functions. (Nikolus Coupland, 2007, pg:

A. 4: New Criticism: From the 1930 to 1960 New Criticism was the most influential movement in the American Literary Criticism. Its sponsors, exponents and practitioners both English and American have made it a pervasive force in the 20th century. The term ‘New Criticism’ became current after the publication of John Crowe Ransom’s book ‘the New Criticism’ (1941). It has come to be applied to the wide spread tendency on recent American Criticism deriving in part from various elements in Richard’s ‘Principles of Literary Criticism’ (1926) and from the ‘selected essays’ (1932) of T.S. Eliot. Notable critics in this mode are Cleanth Brook, Robert Penn Warren, R. P. Blackmur, Allen Tate, J.C. Ransom and William K. Wimsatt. An important English critic who shares some critical tenets and practices with these American new critics is F.R. Leaves. It may be mentioned here that the brook and Warren’s book ‘Understanding Fiction’ (1959) is the standard book of the ‘New Criticism’. It did much to make the New Criticism as a standard method of teaching literature in America colleges and