The year’s work in stylistics 2020

1. Lockdown stylistics continued

When I signed off the previous ‘Year’s work’ article I naively looked forward to a year ahead of restored travel to international conferences and other trappings of the ‘old normal’. Instead it has been another year of Zooming here and Teaming there and e-books and e-learning. All of this has brought such disruption and steep learning curves that, even amongst the few positives which academics may have found in our ongoing lockdown lives, we could be forgiven for not producing any new work at all. Not so stylisticians. To Simpson’s (2014: 4) three ‘Rs’, we can now add ‘resilience’, for stylisticians seem to have responded to the crisis of the pandemic by continuing to produce work of incredible breadth and depth. To paraphrase the epigraph from Bram Stoker, it is really wonderful how much resilience there is in stylistics. The same resilience cannot be necessarily attributed to me, so I wish to bring forward the disclaimer that often comes at the end of the ‘Year’s work’ that it is not possible to acknowledge all of the work produced in stylistics in a single year in a single article. Trying to be as comprehensive as possible has been complicated by the conditions of lockdown, for example where ‘remote access’ has not been granted or where publishers refuse steadfastly to stray from the new e-book obsession. Nonetheless the article aims to be a fairly thorough snapshot, if there is such a thing, into the resilient and unfaltering stylistics of 2020. As always, articles published in Language and Literature are not included in the references section to protect the impact factor of the journal but they are given with relevant volume and issue numbers so that readers can locate them. The sections into which the article is organised are not necessarily intended to indicate definitive categories; many works engage with diverse textual data and analytical methods and are categorised in ways which may not always do justice to that diversity.

One title which exemplifies this diversity of data and methodology is Stylistic Manipulation of the Reader in Contemporary Fiction (Sorlin, 2020a), a collection which brings together cognitive, pragmatic and multimodal analysis of texts ranging from modern poetry to short stories, novels and translations. Building on previous work (Sorlin, 2016, 2017) which views manipulation of the reader on a continuum between persuasion and coercion, and over the course of ten chapters divided into three parts, this collection analyses the different techniques which comprise this manipulative spectrum. Lambrou (2020) analyses the unconventional literary techniques in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) by John Fowles. This postmodern historical novel is renowned for the ‘subverted story structure’ (Lambrou, 2020a: 47) which inevitably manipulates readers in offering three potential endings. Lambrou analyses these endings, one a counterfactual daydream and the others two ‘what if’ endings which construct a ‘forking path’ on the narrative road, in light of the concept of metalepsis (Genette, 1980) to demonstrate the ultimate manipulative power of the author/narrator. Macrae (2020a) explores social deixis in literature, examining a range of overlapping deictic categories to offer two main social deictic sub-types, Attitudinal-experiential deixis and Socio-relational deixis, which are applied to the last stanza of ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ by Dylan Thomas. These two social deictic sub-types highlight the shifting addressees in this verse, between reader and ‘my father’ and potentially God, and foreground therefore the somewhat ambivalent status of the reader. The chapter by Montoro (2020) utilises the conversational maxims (Grice, 1975) to analyse the claims of novelist Henry Green that the ‘novel of the future’ should prioritise dialogue over description. Focussing on Nothing (1950) and Doting (1952), Green’s last two novels, Montoro establishes the primacy of this ‘oblique’ dialogue, marked for indirectness and implicature, and uses a corpus-pragmatics approach (Romero Trillo, 2017) to analyse the grammatical elements, particularly an increased presence of adverbs and interjections, of this shift in narrative. Scott (2020a) draws upon approaches in ‘steam stylistics’ (Carter, 2010) and cognitive poetics (Stockwell, 2002, 2009) to examine diegesis and mimesis. Focussing on the ‘“problem” of homodiegesis’ (Scott, 2020a: 98), where the reader can be isolated and unbalanced by the dual role of narrator and character, Scott examines Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) as an example of how this imbalance can be redressed ‘through a deft intermeshing of the two main storyworlds of the novel and the movement (or alternation) between them’ (Scott, 2020a: 110).

Three chapters in this collection consider how readers respond to stylistic manipulation. Clark (2020a, 2020b) explores how writers manipulate the inferential processes by making implicatures and explicatures more or less accessible and how this affects the reading experience. Comparing three contemporary novels and considering reader responses given in an online forum, this chapter uses Relevance Theory to consider reading in terms of inferential processing and also demonstrates that readers often treat novels as ‘communicative acts with some concerns for the intention of their authors’ (Clark, 2020a, 2020b: 142). The chapter by Hidalgo-Downing (2020) carries out an empirical reader-response analysis of the ending of ‘A perfect day for bananafish’ by J.D. Salinger. Readers who find the protagonist’s suicide unexpected at the end of the story are less surprised when tasked to engage with the text more like an analyst, suggesting different levels of involvement for these different types of readers. Whiteley (2020a) also utilises reading groups in analysing Simon Armitage’s poem ‘Upon opening the chest freezer’, thoroughly examining the responses of reading groups of men and women respectively. The groups consider blame and agency, engage with literal and metaphorical meanings in the text and, in one group, generate humour from the poem. Thus, Whiteley demonstrates that readers are not just ‘passive recipients of the “manipulations” of the text’ (Whiteley, 2020a: 189) but rather that the act of reading involves more multidirectional interpretations of and interactions with texts.

The third section of this collection looks at genre-specific and multimodal manipulation. Emmott and Alexander (2020) analyse the highly manipulative genre of detective fiction by examining a range of work by Agatha Christie. They focus on how Christie manipulates the ‘shallow processing’ of readers by closely controlling how, and indeed if, certain specific detail is offered to them and how she cognitively misdirects readers by presenting them with ‘tasks’ which ‘occupy their attention but distract from finding key solutions’ (Emmott and Alexander, 2020: 212). Gregoriou’s (2020a) focus is also on crime fiction, in this case on a Greek translation of Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003) and an English translation of Amyna Zonis (Defence Zone) (1998) by Petros Markaris. Gregoriou explores a range of manipulative devices necessary for creating successful ‘whodunit’ fiction and suggests that ‘crime fiction-specific creative skills’ (Gregoriou, 2020a: 230) are necessary for effective translations of crime fiction. Nørgaard (2020) examines typography in S. (2013) by J. J. Abrams and Dough Dorst to demonstrate that manipulation is not exclusively textual. Considering modality and visual salience, and drawing on the categorisation of typeface constructed by Nørgaard (2019), this chapter illustrates how manipulation of the reader can be achieved by complex visual design as well as by more traditional linguistic means. This collection is somewhat manipulative itself in that the chapters provide such erudite and fascinating insights into how writers, readers, analysts, translators and designers interact that one is compelled to engage with all of them. It has been my custom to open the ‘Year’s work’ by presenting a slightly longer insight into one of the many stand-out book length studies produced in a year in stylistics, but even then it is impossible to provide any more than a concise overview and, as always, readers are encouraged to read – or indeed, be manipulated – further.

As the first book-length study focussed on manipulation through language in fiction, this collection is representative of the constantly emerging directions being taken by stylistics. These explorations, of course, are informed by seminal works in the discipline which have preceded them and if there is one advantage of the advent of the e-book it is that many influential titles and collections are being re-issued electronically. The Language and Literature Reader (Carter and Stockwell, 2008) contains contributions from a who’s-who of stylisticians and for any reader of this article – although I suspect there are few – not yet acquainted with this collection, it has been made available in e-book format in 2020. Cognitive linguistics featured prominently in the ‘New Directions’ section of the collection; no longer ‘new’ but continuing to take ‘new directions’ – epitomised by one of the collections to be acknowledged below – it is to work in cognition that we turn next.

2. Cognition

When the first edition of Cognitive Poetics (Stockwell, 2002) was published it was a compelling account of an area which was still being defined as stylisticians were beginning to explore ‘more systematically the cognitive structures that readers employ when reading texts’ (Simpson, 2014: 40). Indeed, the ‘Year’s work’ article for 2002 speculated that ‘cognitive poetics/rhetoric/stylistics’ had ‘established its hegemony or at least critical mass as regards the study of language and literature’ (Hall, 12(4): 353). Almost two decades later and that critical mass is weighty indeed and the second edition of Cognitive Poetics (Stockwell, 2020a) – the writing and production process of which was charted by many of us who follow the author on Twitter – emerges in a scholarly environment in stylistics where cognitive approaches are widespread and dominant. The new edition of this textbook parallels structural aspects of the original in that each chapter addresses a key framework in cognitive poetics and demonstrates how it can be applied to a range of literary texts, but the book also reflects the fact that cognitive poetics has developed significantly in recent years. For example, Chapter 2 (‘Prototypicality and contexts’), which is developed from the third chapter of the first edition, pays particular attention to the notion of situatedness and the relationship between situation-based prototypical models and our conception of literary genres. The fifth chapter (‘Text and resonance’) is a new addition which sets out an attention-resonance framework and reflects therefore the advances which have been made in the field by major works, in this case by Stockwell (2009), in the years since the first edition.

One of the major fields to gain a significant foothold in stylistics as a result of the ‘cognitive turn’ is Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 2008) which has continued to develop and expand since the publication of the first collection of papers that established it as a major new approach in stylistics (Harrison et al., 2014). New Directions in Cognitive Grammar and Style (Giovanelli et al., 2020) is a major collection in Bloomsbury’s Advances in Stylistics series which exemplifies over fifteen chapters how research in Cognitive Grammar continues to develop. Organised into four sections which address Cognitive Grammar in literary, non-literary, multimodal and educational contexts, this collection is a testament to how Cognitive Grammar has evolved into a significant field in (cognitive) stylistics, particularly in terms of how it has integrated with traditional models in stylistic analysis. This attribute is demonstrated by the first part of the collection. Stockwell (2020b) addresses speech and thought presentation and presents a new, cognitively-grounded approach to free indirect discourse, whilst Holm (2020) and McLoughlin (2020) examine the interactions of Cognitive Grammar and metaphor. Holm analyses the speculative fiction novel Exit West (2017) by Mohsin Hamid, demonstrating how the narrator’s displacement is communicated through conflicting style choices in the novel, such as the use of modality and action chains to disrupt readers’ construal of well-established memory metaphors. McLoughlin draws on Conceptual Integration Theory to analyse complex metaphorical blends in the Francis Harvey poem ‘The Deaf Woman in the Glen’. McLoughlin shows how Blending Theory can augment Cognitive Grammar to analyse how linguistic features can prompt a refocus of the reader’s attention on the target domain of a metaphor with reference to features of the source domain. The chapter by Nuttall (2020) addresses subjective/objective construal in Cognitive Grammar in a discussion of the E.E. Cummings poem ‘Me up at does’, showing that the reader’s attribution of parallel mental states to the poet and the mouse in the poem can be framed by the levels of construal in the text. The second part of the collection, on non-literary contexts of Cognitive Grammar, has a particular political focus. Hart (2020) analyses news reports from Gaza in terms of their ‘intersemiotic parallelism’ (Liu and O’Halloran, 2009), that is, how visual images connect to conceptualisations which are cued by a text, and Browse (2020a) combines Text World Theory (Gavins, 2007) and active audience theory (Hall, 1980) with Cognitive Grammar to examine socially conditioned audience reactions to speeches by the British politicians Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn. Voice (2020) offers an explication of how Cognitive Grammar itself can be applied to language at the more macro discourse level of language as well as at the closer syntactic level through an examination of characterisation and intentionality. The section of the collection which investigates Cognitive Grammar in multimodal contexts is chiefly concerned with music. Building on a previous article in this journal (Neary, 28(1)), Neary (2020) analyses the relationship of music and lyrics in ‘Pyramid Song’ by Radiohead using ‘musical grammar’ (Zbikowski, 2017) and Bown (2020), drawing on her own professional experience, suggests that the insights into how readers conceptualise texts given by Cognitive Grammar are advantageous to writers of musical texts. An additional chapter on multimodal contexts by Finn (2020) analyses the connection between objective and subjective viewing arrangements and linguistic features like deixis and grounding in the pictorial narration of the Allison Bechdel graphic novel Are You My Mother? (2012). Examining Cognitive Grammar’s usefulness in educational contexts, Giovanelli and Harrison (2020) discuss the writing of their textbook Cognitive Grammar in Stylistics (Giovanelli and Harrison, 2018), which was featured in the ‘Year’s work’ article for 2018 for the way in which it made the often theoretically-heavy Cognitive Grammar framework accessible for undergraduate readers. The chapter by Cushing (2020a) draws on his experience with even younger learners, in English secondary schools, to demonstrate the advantages of Cognitive Grammar for the teaching of poetry. Cushing (2020a: 256) acknowledges that stylistics is ‘unlikely to be part of prototypical English teachers’ repertoire’ – a fact which may be partly redressed by a recent guide for teachers and researchers by Mason and Giovanelli (2021) – and calls for a more systematic engagement with linguistics to be provided through training opportunities for English teachers. A final chapter in the collection by Zacharias (2020) also examines the secondary classroom by demonstrating how Cognitive Grammar can be used to analyse classroom discourse.

Cognitive Grammar also features in articles which take a cognitive approach in 2020, such as two articles by Rundquist. Rundquist (2020), like Stockwell (2020b), examines speech and thought presentation from a Cognitive Grammar perspective with a focus on Free Indirect Thought. In an analysis of The Lost Weekend (1944) by Charles Jackson, Rundquist proposes a focussed mind style analysis which looks to elucidate the mental activity of fictional characters rather than readers. The second article (Rundquist, 29(1)), published in this journal, uses Cognitive Grammar concepts such as specificity, scope and profile to analyse the representation of the drunken state of mind of the protagonist in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1945). Mind style is also the analytical focus of Whiteley (2020b) in an article which explores the cognitive processes of reading groups in interpreting literary characters in the novel The Universe Versus Alex Woods by Gavin Extence (2013) as ‘autistic’. Gregoriou (29(4)) explores a different type of mind style, that of criminals and profilers, in Thomas Harris’ novel Silence of the Lambs (2013), in an article which also considers schematic incongruity, conversational power play and language which depicts the criminal viewpoint in the text. Reali (2020) explores fictional characters’ mind styles through an analysis of metaphorical expressions of emotion in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). A diverse range of text-types continue to be analysed through a cognitive lens in 2020. For example, Norledge (29(1)) applies Text World Theory to examine how readers experience the ‘challenge’ of dystopian literature, examining the creation of text worlds in the interactive digital novel The Ark (2014) by Annabel Smith, and Harrison (29(1)) utilises cognitive stylistics to analyse the voiceover narration in the television series The Handmaid’s Tale. Harrison investigates how linguistic features and visual aspects of production combine in presenting the split perspective of the protagonist and foregrounding the key themes of the series. In another innovative use of cognition, Stockwell (29(4)) adopts cognitive deictic theory to account for the readerly dimension of the use of regional accent and dialect in literary fiction, a feature usually explored by approaches in sociolinguistics. Alongside novels and digital novels, television and film, such as the cognitive blending analysis of the Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There (2007) in an article by Beltrami (2020), cognitive methods have also been applied to poetry, for example by Stadnik (2020), who analyses singularity in the poem ‘Cat in an Empty Apartment’ by Wislawa Szymborska through an examination of situatedness, and by McLoughlin (29(4)) again drawing together Blending Theory and Text World Theory in an examination of ‘Flamingos in Dudley Zoo’ by Emma Purhouse.

The major work in 2020 in cognitive approaches to poetry was Poetry in the Mind (Gavins, 2020). Gavins focuses exclusively and purposefully on critically-acclaimed twenty-first century poets and draws on her expertise in Text World Theory (Gavins, 2007; Gavins and Lahey, 2016) to practically apply frameworks in cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology to the understanding and effects of poetry. Each chapter examines a core aspect of poetic discourse (time and space, intertextuality, absence, performance, metaphor) with the aim to ‘understand not just how poetry creates text-worlds in readers’ minds, but the effects those text-worlds have beyond simple comprehension and in the real world’ (Gavins, 2020: 22). This book provides tremendously insightful analytical depth owing to its approach of focussing in each chapter on a single poem in its entirety through the application of a specific stylistic theme. Gavins analyses spatial and temporal parameters in ‘Evening Song’ by Simon Armitage, the cognitive links of Sinead Morrissey’s ‘1801’ with the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, absence and near-presence in the language of negation in ‘Hearsay’ by John Burnside, a performance of ‘End Times’ by Kate Tempest (examining the link between poetry and rap and between physical performance and reception), and chains of metaphor worlds constructed by Alice Oswald in the poem ‘Song of a Stone’. This book exemplifies the richness which is provided by a cognitivist examination of poetic language and is highly recommended to scholars with specific interests in Text World Theory and cognitive linguistics and with general interests in the stylistic analysis of poetry.

Another major book on the cognitive approach to poetry is The Poem as Icon (Freeman, 2020), which examines the links between cognitive poetics and cognate disciplines such as phenomenology and semiotics in establishing ‘poetic iconicity’, extensively illustrated by analysis of poetry from Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and William Blake, amongst others.

An examination of another text-type is Style and Emotion in Comic Novels and Short Stories (Marszalek, 2020), which offers a cognitive stylistic insight into the reaction of readers to humour. Marszalek demonstrates through systematic stylistic analysis of comic texts, by Douglas Adams and Joseph Heller for example, how readers become immersed in fictional comic worlds. Illustrating how readers’ reaction to comedy is shaped by blends of negative and positive emotion triggered by the linguistic construction of character and plot, this book is an important contribution to research in literary humour.

Finally in this section, another book which will be of interest to cognitive stylisticians is Cognitive Discourse Analysis (Tenbrink, 2020), a cross-disciplinary text which introduces readers to important cognitive discourse theories and provides wide ranging analytical insights into areas such as perspective, granularity, inference and other aspects of cognitive discourse analysis.

3. Narrative

Stylistic explorations in narrative are as longstanding as some of those in cognition are new and emerging, but longevity should not be taken as an indication that narrative research does not continue to develop and flourish. This development is epitomised in the collection Narrative Retellings (Lambrou, 2020b), which explores over thirteen chapters how a range of fictional and factual narratives can be told and, in particular, retold. Processes of retelling, such as rereading and adaptation, are examined in depth across a diverse range of narrative text-types divided into three main sections: fictional retellings, factual retellings and pedagogical applications of retellings. Scott (2020b) explores retelling through the notion of ‘restorying’, which ‘involves a restoration of other texts (or pre-texts): a rejuvenation, a re-energizing, even a resurrection’ (Scott 2020b: 23), with reference to how the process grants new creativity to a narrative by the influence of the adaptor’s perspective. Furlong (2020a) also considers the importance of the adaptor and how the relationship is formed with the source text, in this case Pride and Prejudice (1813), as well as how its reception and interpretation is driven by the adaptor’s stylistic choices. Jane Austen is also the focus of the chapter by Bray (2020a), which considers the retellings which comprise The Austen Project by comparing the original texts with these modern retellings and discussing the ‘thorny issue’ (Bray, 2020a: 77) of value judgements taken by stylistic work. In another chapter, in the collection Romanticism and the Letter (Callaghan and Howe, 2020), Bray (2020b) addresses tensions in Austen’s epistolary style and Austen’s style is also, predictably enough, the focus of Jane Austen’s Style (Toner, 2020), a monograph which assesses the stylistic and structural techniques through which Austen constructs ‘narrative economy’ in the conciseness of plot, description and dialogue in her novels. Returning to Lambrou’s collection on retelling, Toolan (2020a) examines the role of retelling through repetition and paragraph structure in the short story ‘Swallows’ by John McGahern. Toolan demonstrates how, despite the lack of a conventional, emotionally focussed conclusion in this story, the ‘downbeat ending is given depth and resonance by means of many subtle cross- and intra-paragraph repetitions’ (Toolan, 2020a: 75). Gregoriou’s (2020b) chapter compares the annotations and handwritten notes on the draft of Gallows View (1987) by Peter Robinson with the published edition of the novel. Given that ‘crime fiction is the art of misdirection’ (Gregoriou, 2020b: 93), Gregoriou examines the stylistic nature of this misdirection whereby the writer must both deceive and sufficiently furnish the reader with narrative details. The first chapter in the section on factual retellings, by Giovanelli (2020), examines the poem ‘Lamentations’ by Siegfried Sassoon and his novel Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), which draws on Sassoon’s war diaries, letters and poetry. Giovanelli (2020) applies Cognitive Grammar, specifically the notion of construal, to analyse how trauma is reframed across these two narrative forms. Trauma is also central to the chapters by Boase-Beier (2020) and Canning (2020). Boase-Beier (2020) is focussed on the translation of poems by Holocaust survivors and addresses some of the complex ethics of translations which accommodate the sharing of experiences but also question to what extent it is possible to faithfully retell another’s trauma. Canning (2020) applies a critical stylistic approach to the classic narrative model of Labov and Waletzky (1967) to analyse the witness statement retellings of the Hillsborough Disaster in 1989. Canning (2020: 156) shows how statements were ‘disproportionately oriented to Liverpool fans’ behaviour and yet do not include references to the behaviour of the police’ owing to external influences on an apparently monolithic narrative so that stories become ‘institutionally controlled and ideologically loaded’ to the detriment of the victims of the disaster. The chapter by Ringrow (2020a) applies the problem-solution pattern (Hoey, 1983) to advertorials on social media. Multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) is utilised to give insights into the ‘complex intersections between gender, identity and newer forms of advertising discourse’ (Ringrow, 2020a: 164) and to examine narrative retelling in a comparison between advertising briefing notes and finished advertorials. In the section on pedagogy, Cushing (2020b) presents a secondary school project where a Text World Theory examination of the poem ‘Spinning’ by Kevin Griffith was used to train teachers to adopt stylistic methods in the teaching of English literature. Warner (2020) is also focussed on classroom activity, this time a writing assignment based on autobiographical literature for second language learners of German, in arguing for the importance of stylistic insights for students challenged to reimagine their own autobiographical narrative. The last chapter in this significant collection is by Harrison and Nuttall (2020) and considers retelling in the context of rereading, analysing readers’ responses to ‘The Freeze-Dried Groom’, a short story by Margaret Atwood. Harrison and Nuttall (2020) examine how closer reading of the texts affects readers’ responses. They suggest that more attentive rereading, in an exercise where students produce their own ending to the story, has implications for narrative expression, perspective and point of view.

Another significant text in narrative this year is the extensive collection The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories (Dinnen and Warhol, 2020), which over twenty-eight chapters offers wide ranging investigations into narrative theory and analytical approaches to narratology. The collection comprises sections on cognitive approaches to narrative, situated narrative theories, digital narratives, philosophical narratives and narratives of television, film and graphic novels. Perhaps of most interest to stylisticians are the chapters in the section on anti-mimetic narrative theories by Bell and Ensslin (2020), which examines ‘unnatural’ textual features which have become conventional in digital fiction, and by Richardson (2020), which offers a taxonomy of unnatural endings in fiction and drama. Unnatural Narratology: Extensions, Revisions, and Challenges (Alber and Richardson, 2020) is an edited collection of nine chapters specifically focussed on theoretical questions in studies of unnatural narratives. Narrative endings are also addressed by Benjamin (2020) in an article which examines the ‘double closure’ in Samuel Beckett’s cryptic novel Murphy (1938). Beckett is also the subject of an article by Li (2020), examining the use of the middle voice in the plays Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) and Ohio Impromptu (1981). Alongside novels and plays, poetry has also been examined in detail by narrative theorists this year, for example by Wolf (2020), who argues for the development of ‘lyrology’ to differentiate poetry from other narrative forms, and by Castiglione (2020) in an article which sets out a stylistic model for the analysis of verbal imagery, analysing poetry from Wilfred Owen, Marianne Moore and Philip Larkin. Work in narrative in 2020 was also interested, in a range of ways, in the role of the reader. Macrae (2020b) reports on data from empirical exercises which investigate the relationship between reading habits, particularly the frequency of reading, and the capacity to visualise narrative scenes. Wang (2020) discusses the readerly dimension of Marina Carr’s play Hecuba (2015), examining how audience participation is elicited by experimental narrative techniques which complicate the dichotomy between mimesis and diegesis. Sorlin (2020b) examines the ‘evolution of the author-reader relationship across centuries and media’ (Sorlin, 2020b: 62) in a pragmatic, narratological and cognitive analysis of two novel forms written over two centuries apart In this journal, Fernandez-Quintanilla (29(2)) examines readers’ responses to narratives of persecution in the short stories of Eduardo Galeano in an article which suggests new theoretical directions for work in narrative empathy, and Martinez and Herman (29(2)) examine the blends of storyworld possible selves for readers of the one-page graphic novel ‘City’. Grisot et al. (29(2)) address readers’ responses to Virginia Woolf’s experimental techniques of speech, thought and consciousness presentation, suggesting through an empirical analysis focussed on To the Lighthouse (1927) and Mrs Dalloway (1925) that textual difficulty is increased by the range of perspectives of free indirect style. Also drawing on Virginia Woolf, alongside Katherine Mansfield, Sotirova (2020) analyses the concept of the ‘empty centre’ to evaluate the status of the narrator in Modernist fiction, particularly arguing that ‘we need to construct a new understanding of the status of the Modernist narrator which takes into account some of the central tenets of the Modernist aesthetic, those concerning subjectivity and the possibility of objectivity’ (Sotirova, 2020: 75). From Modernism to metamodernism, Gibbons (2020) examines a range of metamodernist fiction, primarily 10:04 (2014) by Ben Lerner, to suggest a new temporal experience, prompted by anthropocenic climate change, which resuscitates concepts of the future which are constrained in postmodernism. Time, specifically complex nonlinear structures, is also central to an article by Willemsen and Kiss (2020), which draws on conceptual metaphor theory and mental timeline theory to suggest that readers make sense of nonlinear storyworlds by their ability to cognitively view time in terms of space.

Alongside the myriad ways of receiving and conceiving stories, work in narrative remains infinitely interested in ways of telling stories. A Multimodal Perspective on Applied Storytelling Performances (Lwin, 2020) develops a framework to analyse how contemporary institutions use live storytelling performances as communicative and educational tools. The framework is applied to a corpus of applied storytelling performances in institutional contexts in Singapore, such as ‘story time’ in a school, ‘story hour’ in a public library and ‘show ‘n’ tell’ in a museum. Lwin (2020) conducts a multimodal analysis of performance features to examine the process of developing narrativity and highlight the importance of the relationship between storyteller and audience. Labov (2020) presents an article on ‘narratives of uncontrollable grief’ which examines methods of controlling emotional expression. Thomas (2020a, 2020b) analyses verbal and nonverbal disruption in extracts from a thirteen-minute narrative to investigate how threats to face are recognised, managed and ‘made tellable’. Peplow (2020) discusses stance taking and storytelling in naturally occurring speech, drawing on data from reading group talk. We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction (Bekhta, 2020) examines the plural voice in fiction and explores the range of repercussions of collective narrative voices in contemporary texts from authors such as Joyce Carol Oates and Julie Otsuka. Seargeant (2020) investigates political narratives in The Art of Political Storytelling, particularly examining contemporary post-truth contexts such as the Trump presidency and Brexit Britain as well as strategies of disinformation, ‘fake news’ and propaganda which are well established in the politics of today. The book establishes that an ‘understanding of narrative can provide us with important insights into the workings of power’ (Seargeant, 2020:7) and by examining in detail how stories are structured, shared and contested demonstrates the fundamental role of the use and manipulation of language in shaping the dominant ideas of our contemporary political climate.

4. Discourse and multimodality

Politics and political narratives lead us seamlessly into this section on work in 2020 which deals with the considerable overlap between stylistics and discourse analysis, in which analysts are generally focussed on the ideological role of language in a broad range of societal contexts. Brexit, addressed by Seargeant’s book as one manifestation of the populism of contemporary politics, continues to feature heavily in scholarly work, albeit perhaps not as heavily as its consequences continue to weigh upon those of us affected by them. One notable example is an article by Higgins (2020) which analyses how the discourses of masculinity pervade Brexit debates, connecting performative masculinity with the nation-based politics of the right. The Trump presidency, thankfully concluded at the time of writing, will also likely continue to feature in work in discourse analysis, such as that article by Montgomery (2020) which analyses the communicative behaviour of participants in large scale Trump campaign rallies. Politics is also one of several topics addressed in the important collection Contemporary Media Stylistics (Ringrow and Pihlaja, 2020), particularly in the chapter by Browse (2020b) which examines the construction of ‘authenticity’ in campaign videos for former British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Overall, this significant volume demonstrates how recent frameworks in stylistics are being applied to the ever increasing range of contemporary media discourse. These innovative discourse areas are exemplified in the chapter by Ringrow (2020b) which analyses modest fashion blogs through conceptual metaphor theory, suggesting that ‘common metaphors […] are used to emphasize a narrative of gender differences and to suggest faith-based views of the female body are radically different from those of mainstream society’ (Ringrow, 2020b:15). Ringrow (2020c) also examines religious blogs through metaphor in an analysis which explores female bloggers’ figurative construction of motherhood. Pihlaja’s (2020) chapter is also interested in religious discourse and analyses the stylistic features in the construction of intimacy between speaker and audience in evangelical preaching online, particularly on Facebook. The chapter by Nuttall and Harrison (2020) also utilises metaphor analysis, in this case to examine data from the Goodreads website to investigate readers’ different experiences of the first book from Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005-08). Online data is also analysed by Hadikin (2020), who uses corpus methods to examine the use of the ‘we’ pronoun on a citizen science forum, and by Djenar and Ewing (2020), who focus on the different uses of emoji in a Malaysian online community. Lugea (2020) applies principles of speech act theory to the internet meme, establishing core stylistic features in the ‘extreme rule-governed culture’ (Lugea, 2020: 103) of the meme and demonstrating how pragma-stylistic effects are achieved through the creative choices of meme authors. Tagg’s (2020) concluding chapter to this volume points out that media stylistics is continuously engaged with ‘traditional media’ alongside these new and developing datasets, and several chapters in the collection analyse newspaper language. The language of sexual violence in the media is the focus of chapters by Tranchese (2020), which carries out a critical discourse analysis (CDA) focussed on collocation, social actors and processes of representations of rape in the British press, and by Tabbert (2020), which uses critical stylistics (Jeffries, 2010) to analyse the newspaper portrayal of German reality television star Gina-Lisa Lohfink who was accused of making false allegations of rape. Ras (2020a) uses a corpus-assisted critical stylistics to examine the British newspaper portrayal of child victims of human trafficking, examining nouns and noun phrases to demonstrate how children are commodified both by traffickers and by newspapers. Bruce (2020) also adopts corpus methods, applying a socio-cognitive framework to analyse the keyword links between online user comments and print articles from newspapers on the right reporting on Catholicism and Islam. Davies (2020) presents a stylistic framework for the analysis of newspaper editorials alongside so-called ‘hard news’ media content. This chapter demonstrates ‘how a defining distinction is the absence and presence of authorial voice in the news report and the editorial column’ and also argues that the ‘aura of facticity’ possessed by news reports ‘camouflages attitudes and values’ embedded within them (Davies, 2020: 268).

A fascinating account of the print media in Britain is offered in Tabloiding the Truth (Buckledee, 2020). Buckledee examines issues such as national stereotypes, the tabloid representation of women and content as varied as reportage on celebrities’ love lives on one hand and war on the other. An interdisciplinary approach draws on stylistics and CDA to analyse the tabloid format of a ‘heady mix of real information and lowbrow entertainment, sensationalism and genuine investigative journalism, trashy gossip and well-informed analyses, political partnership and the self-confidence to cock a snook at the rich and powerful, plus, of course, the willingness to tell their readers both uncomfortable truths and copious quantities of bovine faeces’ (Buckledee, 2020: 181).

Another indication of the enduring interest in media discourse is how linguists have continuously engaged with the developing formats of the news. In Multimodal News Analysis across Cultures (Caple et al., 2020), corpus-based discourse analysts examine the construction of news values in language and images. Presenting as case studies the reporting of national days in Australia and China respectively, this text extends corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis to consider photography alongside text and to move analysis beyond exclusively English language data. The analysis demonstrates how linguistic concepts can be applied to the framework of discursive news values analysis (DNVA) to provide a more fully comprehensive insight into the operation of multimodal news media. A discourse analysis of Australia Day in newspapers and on the social media platform Instagram is also the focus of a chapter by Caple and Bednarek (2020) in Discourses of Hope and Reconciliation (Zappavigna and Dreyfus, 2020), a collection of eleven chapters in four themes – Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), linguistic typology, educational linguistics and positive discourse analysis – which celebrates the enormous contribution of J. R. Martin to the development of SFL. Another text which views news across cultures is Stylistic Deceptions in Online News (Riggs, 2020), which takes a mixed-methods approach drawing on content analysis, translation studies and comparative stylistics to analyse how online news language in the UK, Spain and Switzerland shapes reader interpretations of people and places, particularly in France after the Nice attacks of 2016. In another first and concerned principally with the extension of established linguistic methods into multimodal contexts, Visual and Multimodal Communication (Forceville, 2020) investigates how Relevance Theory can be applied to visual discourse, including pictograms, logos and signs, advertising, cartoons and comics. Through these case studies and as the result of a comprehensive theoretical inventory, Forceville demonstrates how Relevance Theory, usually principally concerned with live oral exchanges, can be adapted and expanded to be relevant to the analysis of mass communicative visuals. Analysis of telecinematic discourse has been at the forefront of the adoption in stylistics of multimodal methods of analysis and Telecinematic Stylistics (Hoffman and Kirner-Ludwig, 2020) is another major collection in Bloomsbury’s Advances in Stylistics series this year. The thirteen chapters in the collection are incredibly varied and provide a genuine showcase for the range of datasets and methods which are targeted by telecinematic stylistics, from corpus-based dialogue analysis (Bednarek, 2020a; Jautz and Minnow, 2020; Pavesi, 2020) to examining shots and cuts (Schubert, 2020) and investigating the processes of adaptation (Sanchez-Stockhammer, 2020). The chapter by Bednarek utilises the Sydney Corpus of Television Dialogue (SydTV), the structure and composition of which is also outlined in an article in the journal Corpora (Bednarek, 2020b). The chapters in the collection also address a wide cross section of telecinematic genres. Messerli (2020) conducts a pragmatic analysis of linguistic and multimodal repetitions in the sitcom Better with You and Piazza (2020) examines audio-visual strategies in documentaries, examining both voice style and the features of the visual staging of shot sequences in representing traveller and gypsy communities on screen. Chovanec (2020) also focuses on documentaries, examining the how moral messages are communicated in the ostensibly objective characterisations in the series How Britain Worked. The television series The Bravermans is the focus of the chapter by Reichelt (2020), which analyses the dialogue and the visual depiction of the autistic protagonist in the series. Various aspects of film discourses are also analysed by several chapters in the collection. Krebs (2020) presents a pragma-stylistic framework to analyse film trailers and Dahne and Piazza (2020) examine film dialogue and captions. They use a Relevance-based framework to gain insight into the captioning process of the series Breaking Bad, particularly examining how the experiences of deaf recipients are affected by technical and linguistic aspects of captioning. Gordejuela (2020) analyses the establishment of intertextuality through metatextual devices in the in the films of Alfred Hitchcock and Kirner-Ludwig (2020) analyses twelve different historical drama film scripts. The analysis of ‘pseudo-authenticity’ establishes that pseudo-archaic linguistic features in the dialogue of these films are used to support the cultural frames of historical contexts but are not primarily responsible for their cognitive construction.

A significant body of work which applies linguistics to scientific and health matters was published in 2020. For example, Deignan and Semino (2020) focus on the metaphors used to discuss climate change in educational material and in interviews with secondary school pupils in the UK and Bednarek and Carr (2020) conduct a computer-based analysis of diabetes coverage in Australian newspapers. Coffey-Glover (2020) uses feminist discourse analysis to investigate the online language of ‘exclusive pumpers’, women who express breastmilk as an alternative to breast feeding or using formula. The article considers how narratives of normative motherhood, such as ‘breast is best’, are strengthened by overarching discourses which construct exclusive pumping as abnormal. The collection Applying Linguistics in Illness and Healthcare Contexts (Demjén, 2020) comprises thirteen chapters which address how the lived-experience of different illnesses can be better understood through the application of linguistic analysis. The collection is organised into four sections, the first of which addresses these experiences of illness and includes three chapters which utilise corpus analysis tools (Brookes, 2020; Kinloch and Jaworska, 2020; Semino et al., 2020) and a fourth which analyses impoliteness in interactions between ‘people who hear voices and their voices’ (Demjén et al., 2020). The analysis links distress felt by voice-hearers to different patterns of impoliteness in the heard voice. The second section of the collection focuses on interactions in healthcare settings and comprises three chapters which suggest improvements for HIV/AIDS consultations in Malawi (Chimbwete-Phiri and Schnurr, 2020), analyse empathy in Dutch chat counselling (Stommel and Lamerichs, 2020) and examine the narrative functions of online health language (Thurnherr et al., 2020). In chapters by Atanasova and Koteyko (2020) and Tang and Rundblad (2020), the third part of the collection examines illness in the mass media whilst the fourth offers four chapters which address professional practice. Sikveland and Stokoe (2020) use conversation analysis to illustrate how triaging in General Practice surgeries can be made more patient-centred and Zayts and Lazzaro-Salazar (2020) conduct an interactional sociolinguistic investigation of how migrant medical professionals reflect on intersections of healthcare systems with cultural practice. Loew et al. (2020) use corpus-based discourse analysis to suggest improvements in understanding palliative care terminology and the chapter by Galasiński and Ziółkowska (2020) offers a CDA on dominant constructions of suicide. It is difficult to do justice to such an insightful collection in a short segment of a review article, but readers interested in the continued contribution of linguistics to seminal real-world experiences are encouraged to engage fully with this text.

5. Corpus stylistics

Corpus and corpus-assisted approaches to the analysis of fictional and non-fictional language seem to be growing in prominence annually and there are several important contributions to both camps in 2020. The major work in the former is Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in 19 ^th -century Narrative Fiction (Busse, 2020), which uses a corpus (57,403 words) of prominent works, from Shelley, Dickens and the Brontës for example, to undertake a systematic and comprehensive investigation of this seminal area of narrative enquiry in literature from the nineteenth-century. Drawing particular attention to the connection between cultural contexts and historical patterns of discourse presentation, this study is the first to take a corpus-assisted approach to speech, writing and thought presentation in fiction in this period. Building on an overview and critique of dominant perspectives of the discourse presentation model (Chapter 2), the corpus-stylistic methodology developed focuses on distribution and lexico-grammatical realisation (Chapter 4), scales and modes of discourse presentation (Chapter 5) and narrative progression (Chapter 7) and allows Busse to identify unique authorial patterns in nineteenth-century fiction and to connect them to ideological as well epistemological concerns.

Another showcase for the importance of computational techniques for the analysis of canonical literature is the special edition of this journal (29(3)), edited by Jonathon Culpeper, which includes six articles which draw in various methodological ways on the resource provided by the Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare’s Language (ESL) project.

Late-twentieth-century fiction is the focus of the collection Phraseology and Style in Subgenres of the Novel (Novakova and Siepmann, 2020). Ten chapters with focuses as diverse as the novel in English and French (Diwersy et al., 2020; Grossman et al., 2020) and science fiction (Gonon and Kraif, 2020; Goossens et al., 2020) for example, combine corpus linguistics with literary studies to analyse lexico-grammatical patterns in contemporary literature. This collection will be particularly insightful for stylisticians with interests in genre identification and hybridisation of genres. An article by Nais (2020) uses the corpus analysis programme AntConc to examine The Portrait of a Lady (1881) by Henry James and The Age of Innocence (1920) by Edith Wharton. In re-examining novels which have been ‘analysed ad nauseum’ (Nais, 2020: 1), this article is another example of the potential of corpus techniques to prise open scholarly doors which often seem jammed shut by the sheer volume of preceding work. In another example of the diversity with which corpus methods can be applied, Hodson (2020) uses the Dialect in British Fiction (DBF) database to examine a corpus of sixteen novels from 1800 to 1836 to analyse the representation of Yorkshire English and characters who use the dialect in literature of the period. Other chapters in this collection, Dialect Writing and the North of England (Honeybone and Maguire, 2020), which will be of particular interest to stylisticians are by Asprey (2020) on Black Country dialect literature, Braber (2020) on how on local language has been represented in ‘dialect literature’ of Nottingham, Hermeston (2020) on metaphorical expression in the Tyneside poem ‘The Pitman’s Pay’ and by Clark (2020a, 2020b), which examines double-voicing in late-twentieth-century cartoons from Staffordshire.

The major contribution from corpus-assisted linguistics to the analysis of non-fictional language in 2020 is the collection The Discursive Construction of Economic Inequality (Gómez-Jiménez and Toolan, 2020), part of Bloomsbury’s Research in Corpus and Discourse series and comprising nine chapters which undertake corpus-assisted discourse studies of public discourse in Britain. Engaging with a chronologically organised spectrum of data examples from 1900 onwards and drawn from the print media, political speeches and policy documents, the collection is unified by a focus on how language normalises and reinforces the wealth inequality which characterises modern and contemporary Britain. Lorenzo-Dus and Almaged (2020) examine concordance lines of the most common ‘exclusion’ words in speeches from the Conservative and Labour parties from 1900 to 2014, wherein the former favour a ‘finance’ focus and the latter a ‘hardship’ one. Spencer-Bennet (2020) examines governmental language, specifically the social deictic discourse strategies of the British Ministry of Information during the Second World War. Van der Bom and Paterson (2020) are focussed on the news media and examine the representation of the welfare state in The Times over six decades. Their results show stable patterns of language which associate the welfare state with the increase of an economic underclass but which focus less on advantages such as the National Health Service, so that the newspaper ‘takes a narrow view of what the welfare state actually is’ and often reduces it to ‘merely the receipt[s] of benefits’ (Van der Bom and Paterson, 2020: 66). The Times newspaper is also the focus of the chapter by Toolan (2020b), which examines the depiction of child poverty between the 1970s and the 2000s. Toolan shows that the newspaper’s depiction of child poverty in terms of requiring state aid in the earlier period to being viewed as connected to the responsibility of individuals and families in the 2000s is reflective of the changing ideology of a publication which now espouses that ‘to make everyone responsible for solving the problems of the poor and their children […] would be doing more than was fair’ (Toolan, 2020b: 88). The British newspaper representation of corporate fraud and modern slavery is the focus of the chapter by Ras (2020b), particularly examining how accountability and responsibility for these crimes is shifted and neutralised. Mulderrig (2020) investigates the language of the anti-obesity campaign Change4Life and how ‘at risk’ groups are constructed. The chapter draws on a corpus of policy documents over twenty years and on broadcast advertisements about obesity which demonstrate that responsibility for child obesity is attributed to the working class whilst commercial industry is exonerated. Jeffries and Walker (2020) combine corpus tools and critical stylistics to analyse ‘austerity’ between 2009-10, when the British government pursued an agenda of targeted spending cuts in the face of the financial crisis, and 2016-17, when the period of austerity had apparently concluded. Keyword analysis shows that ‘austerity’ was central in the earlier period but more peripheral later whilst the accompanying co-textual analysis suggests that it had ‘become more negatively evaluated, less epochal sounding and thus less immediately obvious as the way forward’ by 2016-17 so that it is, worryingly, ‘defined in such a way that it is difficult to argue against as a strategy to get us back onto the road to prosperity’ (Jeffries and Walker, 2020: 140-1). A corpus of television bulletins from 2007 to 2014 is the focus of a content analysis and CDA by Thomas (2020a, 2020b). Concentrating on British channels BBC and ITV, results show that coverage of poverty and income inequality has decreased whilst poverty itself has continued to rise. Teubert’s (2020) chapter considers the role of Western democracies in order to demonstrate that the discourses of politicians do not empower the citizens who they control. A collocational analysis of Hansard illustrates that how ‘democracy’ has come to be debated in British parliamentary language endorses and reinforces inequality. The considerations discussed throughout the collection are addressed in a thought provoking conclusion by the social geographer Danny Dorling who, despite offering optimism in an unknowable future where ‘whenever economic inequality rises it eventually falls’, confirms that the chapters in this volume certainly show ‘how we were fooled’ (Dorling, 2020: 189-90). One of several articles in 2020 applying corpus-assisted discourse analysis to real-world language is by Krendel (2020), which investigates how the lemmas ‘woman’, ‘girl’, ‘man’ and ‘guy’ construct gender identities on an anti-feminist forum on the website Reddit. Acknowledging an article by Culpeper and Haugh (2020) is an apposite place to conclude this section on corpus approaches and look forward to the next section on pragmatics as it analyses the metalanguage of offence in British and Australian English using the Oxford English Corpus. Different uses of ‘offensive’ are examined in terms of different linguistic and cultural contexts.

6. Pragmatics

Considerations of pragmatics in 2020 begin where considerations of corpus approaches ended, with offence, namely with the monograph Offensive Language (O’Driscoll, 2020). In this timely account, O’Driscoll engages with multiple methods in pragmatics, including (im)politeness theory, speech act theory and a Goffmanian view of context, as well as drawing from cognate areas in discourse analysis, to deconstruct the notion of offence itself and to explore comprehensively how offence is articulated across language. The book offers four chapters which address taboo language which can cause offence and which distinguish taboo words, taboo references and taboo predications into separate analytical categories, before presenting case studies of ‘actual offence’. In these occurrences of offence, data is presented from a wide range of examples, such as from the football programme Match of the Day in an analysis of ‘offences against the person’ in cases of personal disparagement, and from Twitter and Facebook for examples of ‘offences against “the peace”’ which involve predications of physical harm. Through these analyses, O’Driscoll develops not just new ways of analysing offensive language but also considers the array of ways in which offence can be intended, conceived and, if necessary responded to. In terms of conventional responses to offence, an article by Shukla and Shukla (2020) examines apology, specifically in this case the growing trend of public apologies by Indian politicians who actually favour evasion and manipulation in direct proportion to the seriousness of the offence to avoid clear statements of remorse. The pragmatics of political discourse is also the focus of Hart and Fuoli (2020) in an article which examines the subjectification and objectification strategies of politicians seeking approval for military action.

The major work in literary pragmatics this year is The Pragmatics of Revision (Chapman, 2020) which is the first full length book study which applies pragmatics to the work of a single author, in this case the Irish novelist George Moore, who was noted for extensively rewriting and reissuing many of his major works. The book applies pragmatics to Moore’s acts of post-publication rewriting by first offering an evaluation of the act of literary rewriting itself and presenting a compellingly clear account of Gricean and neo-Gricean implicature. The four analysis chapters each address chronologically – although chronology is somewhat in flux amidst continuous acts of revision – the first published version of one of Moore’s major works and at least one rewritten version. What emerges is a book which makes a significant contribution to work not just on Moore but particularly on rewriting as an interactive process which has implications for the relationship between writer and reader.

Work in pragmatics continues to cover a wide variety of literary texts, from the analysis of television series, as in an article in this journal which considers the relationship between irony and banter and euphemistic dysphemism and dysphemistic euphemism (Terry, 29(1)), to fictionalised biography, as in Tunca’s (2020) article on the literary significance of repetition and negation in the non-linear narrative of ‘Northern Lights’ by Caryl Phillips. Pragmatics alongside sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics is used in Royal Voices (Evans, 2020), a book which examines correspondence, proclamations and historical chronicles in a fascinating account of language and power in Tudor England. The study demonstrates how the maintenance of monarchic power in this period is achieved through the construction of a sixteenth century ‘royal voice’ in the verbal and visual features of a range of texts which are analysed to give interdisciplinary insight into large scale, archival data.

Relevance Theory, which has been prominent in many of the books and articles already discussed, continues to be prominently applied in work in pragmatics. An article by Furlong (2020b) adopts a relevance theoretic approach to meaning making in theatrical texts, specifically focussed on ‘the vital contributions of the audience in constructing the interpretation of performance, treating it as a communicative act’ (Furlong, 2020b: 1). In this journal, Clark (29(4)) takes a relevance theoretic approach in examining the construction of identity in interaction. The article uses a recording from a House of Commons Select Committee on drug addiction to argue that relevance theoretic ideas can be useful for understanding identity and impression management. An important new work which uses Relevance Theory as a framework is Celebrity Translation in British Theatre (Stock, 2020). By analysing three plays adapted for the British stage – Mark Ravenhill’s Life of Galileo (2013), Roger McGough’s Tartuffe (2008) and Simon Stephens’s A Doll’s House (2012) – Stock examines the influence of these ‘celebrity translators’, including awareness of their contextual background, on audience reception and interpretation of translated theatre. The book is a comprehensive analysis, which uses as audience data interviews, reviews and online responses to the plays, of the ‘voice’ of celebrity translators and how this ‘summation of all the associations that a receiver attaches to an author’ (Stock, 2020: 8) can affect the process of translation, audience attraction to and reception of plays with celebrity translators and the external influences which might impact the inferences drawn by these audiences. Whilst previous research tends to focus on the process of translation and its interaction with elements of stage production, Celebrity Translation in British Theatre is the first detailed, book length study of how a celebrity translator can influence text production and reception.

7. Looking forward

In case the many books, chapters and articles reviewed here are not evidence enough, another marker of the resilience of stylistics is in the work which continues to emerge and which will feature in the ‘Year’s work’ article for 2021. Style and Reader Response (Bell et al., 2021) brings together stylisticians to assess through theoretical and methodological diversity how readers, audiences and viewers engage with texts ranging from contemporary literature to poetry and political speeches to art exhibitions. Language in Place (Virdis et al., 2021) offers stylistic perspectives drawn from corpus linguistics, metaphor analysis and ecostylistics, amongst other approaches, on landscape, place and environment in fictional and non-fictional texts. Alongside these collections, significant monographs, such as Negation, Expectation and Ideology in Written Texts (Nahajec, 2021) and Intralingual Translation of British Novels (Pillière, 2021), to name just two, continue to broaden stylistic horizons, and will be covered in more detail in next year’s article. The 2021 PALA conference, successfully hosted online by the University of Nottingham, demonstrated that these stylistic horizons cannot be restricted even by a global pandemic. That said, and at the risk of tempting fate (again), I venture to hope that next year may allow us to see real horizons at PALA in Aix-en-Provence.