A Dictionary of Stylistics

Abstract

It is now ten years since the second edition of this Dictionary of Stylistics appeared, and over twenty years since the publication of the first. There are other significant milestones, which readers new to the subject, and to this work, might appreciate. It is now just over a hundred years since the Swiss scholar Charles Bally, a student of Ferdinand de Saussure, produced his Traité de stylistique française (1909) and so launched a new discipline in Europe. Some fifty years ago the Russian emigrant Roman Jakobson justified the linguistic study of ‘verbal art’ at a conference in Indiana (published 1960), and so promoted stylistics in the USA. It is just over forty years since Geoffrey Leech published his Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (1969), which helped to popularize stylistics in the UK. His work built a bridge between Western and Eastern Europe, in its creative application of Russian Formalism. It is also just over thirty years since the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) was founded in the UK (1980), now with members all over the world; and almost twenty years since its journal of stylistics was first published (1992), Language and Literature. Throughout this long period stylistics has remained true to its general principle of the analysis of linguistic and textual features for the purpose of interpretation and appreciation, for nonliterary as well as literary texts.