Abstract
1. Introduction
As I write the years’ work in stylistics for 2022, I am looking out of the window of my office in Manchester, UK. It is now December 2023 and the festive weather here seems to be entirely the same as the weather we have had for most of the year – grey and wet. Following on from an inclement summer full of drizzle, which threatened to turn the already saturated ground into something that could only be tackled by specialist footwear, winter seems to offer more of the same. The seemingly unending wet, cold weather makes it easy to forget that January 2023 was the warmest on record in Europe. This unexpectedly warm winter was described by journalists as a ‘significant event’ (Gayle, 2023) which ‘broke all previous records’. Climate scientists describe it as a ‘worrying portent’ of what is to come.
The unpredictable and unseasonable weather is, of course, another symptom of the climate emergency and I am lucky that my weather-based issues this year extend only to feeling hard done by that the sun hasn’t shown its face all that much. On the continent, the extreme heat caused wildfires, with people having to be evacuated from their homes. Many of our stylistics community will have been affected by this frightening sign of climate change. It is for this reason that it is heartening to see the small ways in which stylistics can enrich our understanding of the climate crisis. A recent and key work in this area is Virdis’ (2022) Ecological Stylistics: Ecostylistic Approaches to Discourses of Nature, the Environment and Sustainability. This is just one of the many works published in 2022 which applied stylistics to real-world issues like climate change.
Now to turn to a different kind of climate, that of UK Higher Education. Many of you will have noticed that The Year’s Work for 2022 was absent from the final issue of Language and Literature in December 2023, where this article is typically published. The reason for this was that I, along with many of my colleagues at universities and further education colleges in the UK, went on strike in protest of the working conditions and pay in the sector. Protecting the working conditions of teachers and lecturers is vital to maintaining the health of our disciplines and for supporting the continuation of excellent students of stylistics.
On to more positive news, there was much to celebrate at Language and Literature in 2022, as the journal marked its 30th year. A special issue, edited by Dan McIntyre and Rocío Montoro, features interviews with all previous editors of the journal and provides fascinating insight into the role of a journal editor, as well as the individual aims of each editor during their respective tenures. The issue comprises interviews with Mick Short, Katie Wales, Paul Simpson and Geoff Hall. The interviews show the breadth of subjects covered in the journal and the varied interests of its contributors and readers. Moreover, an anniversary such as this one allows us to take stock of where Language and Literature is now. Thirty years since its inception, it is clear that the journal has become increasingly international, and as McIntyre and Montoro (31/4)
1
state in the introduction to the special issue: This internationalism is also reflected in the articles published in Language and Literature. Of the 14 authors represented in the first three issues of the journal, just four were from outside the UK (Belgium, Spain, USA and the Netherlands). Of the 32 authors represented in the most recent three issues, 22 were from outside the UK, from Australia, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Thailand. Appropriately, the current editorial team is indicative of Language and Literature’s international status, consisting of academics based in Sweden, Spain, France and the UK.
In the introduction, it is also noted that a key concern of the stylisticians involved in the founding of Language and Literature was that early career researchers (ECRs) should also have an opportunity to publish their research. As a result of this, the PALA Occasional Papers series was set up. Thirty years later, amplifying the voices of ECRs working in stylistics is still a priority for the editorial team at Language and Literature, and I am glad to report that, as was the case for The Years Work in Stylistics 2021, PhD student theses reporting on stylistic research which were submitted in 2022 have been included in this year’s work.
Another special issue which served to celebrate research in stylistics was published by the Journal of Literary Semantics in honour of David Miall, who passed away in 2021. The aim of the issue, guest edited by Willie van Peer, was to pay homage to “the richness of concepts, methods and analyses found throughout the work and life of David Miall [as they] have enhanced and expanded our insight into what literature is and does to us, always resting on powerful arguments, always presented serenely, making it difficult to dismiss or ignore them.” (Van Peer, 2022: 74). Descriptions of the articles in the special issue are interspersed throughout the sections in this article and show the multitude of areas in stylistics that David Miall influenced. Moreover, Miall’s work was rooted in rigour, as Peter Stockwell explains in his article in the special issue (Stockwell, 2022a: 131): David Miall always sought to pose questions of significance while rooting his evaluation of key critical concepts and concerns in a rigorous exploration of specific literary texts, […]. This anchoring in matters of textuality meant that his claims and suggestions for significant matters of literary quality, historical canon, readerly effects, and aesthetic value were all grounded in a practical, stylistic sensibility.
In the following sections, work in the various areas Stockwell discusses is described, along with many other areas of stylistics. These sections have been grouped by broad theme, and consequently there will be overlap with other sections; e.g. research adopting a cognitive stylistic approach to the analysis of poetry may equally fit in the ‘poetry’ and ‘cognitive stylistics’ sections. Sections 2-8 describe the work published in 2022 by theme. In Section 9, I provide an overview of the PhD theses submitted in 2022. I provide some concluding remarks in Section 10. As is always the case, my aim here is to represent a broad range of work in stylistics as possible. However, the usual warnings apply, and what follows is not a comprehensive account of all research published in 2022.
2. Pragmatics and multimodal stylistics
2022 saw the publication of an exciting new monograph by Sandrine Sorlin, who continues to further the stylistics community’s understanding of the value of pragmatics to stylistic analysis. Sorlin’s latest book, The Stylistics of ‘You’. Second -Person Pronoun and its Pragmatic Effects (2022) explores the second-person pronoun and its use across medium, time and genre. Using a variety of text types written in English from tweets to literature, and across print and online media, Sorlin provides a rigorous and engaging analysis of the pragmatic functions of this word. Sorlin refers to research in neuropsychology and socio-cognition to investigate ‘you’ to explore how the word is used to position the audience of a text. Sorlin introduces in the book a model for the analysis of ‘you’ which is informed by the work of Fludernick (2011) and revisions to Kluge’s pragma-linguistic continuum. The book is divided into four parts, each tackling ‘you’ in a different text type, or from a different perspective. Part 1: ‘Singularising and Sharing: The Dialectics of ‘You’’ comprises two chapters. The first explores ‘you’ in Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London while the second explores the second person pronoun in Auster’s autobiographical diptych Winter Journal, which is written entirely in the second-person. Sorlin argues that the use of ‘you’ in such autobiographical texts allows for the author to make experiences shareable. In Part 2, ‘The role of ‘You’ in the writing of traumatic events’, Sorlin explores ‘self-othering’ in Grimsley’s Winter Birds and pronouns shifts (what Sorlin terms ‘pronominal veering’ (105)) in Nicholas Royle’s Quilt. Part 3, ‘The author-reader channel across time, gender, sex and race’, comprises three chapters on ways of ‘conversing’ with the reader, how ‘you’ can promote empathy with a character, and ‘you’ in postcolonial writing, respectively. The final section of the book, ‘New ways of implication through the digital medium?’, explores differences in interactivity across print and digital fiction (Chapter 9) and how the actor Kevin Spacey uses ‘you’ in a YouTube video he posted in 2018 to defend himself against sexual assault accusations (Chapter 10). Sorlin concludes the book by providing a clear summary of the value of exploring ‘you’. In this final chapter, Sorlin restates the questions explored in the book, e.g. what is the scope of reference for ‘you’ in different contexts and how does ‘you’ allow us to take into account an author’s personal history. Sorlin’s latest contribution to the pragma-stylistics literature is engaging and illuminating. It is essential reading for any stylistician or pragmatician interested in pronoun use across a range of text types, and specifically those interested in the pragmatic function(s) of ‘you’.
Also focusing on meaning in language, and using data from television shows, Beers Fägersten and Bednarek (31/2) explore swearing in television catchphrases over time. They analyse 168 catchphrases taken from a 70-year period of US-American shows and argue that television (TV) language is a worthy data source to study because it “can both influence and be influenced by linguistic trends” (2022: 213). Their analysis includes a detailed description of the characteristics of catchphrases, as well as a detailed review of the stylistic effect of swearing in this genre, e.g. that swear words can “create characterisation, realism, humour and consistency; to convey ideologies and control viewer emotion; and to contribute to establishing settings and developing plotlines” (Fägersten and Bednarek, 2022: 200). The authors conduct a detailed structural-functional analysis, as well as impoliteness analysis in order to establish features of the catchphrases over time. They report that swearing in catchphrases has become more common over time taking over from the historically more common ‘pseudo-swearing’ catchphrases. Fägersten and Bednarek’s (2022) research will be of great interest to stylisticians working in the area of telecinematic stylistics, (im)politeness research and the interaction between language and pop culture.
Also providing greater stylistic insight into pop culture is Schubert and Werner’s (2022) edited collection, Stylistic Approaches to Pop Culture which explores pop culture discourse thorough a stylistic lens. The collection features analyses of several discourse types from several different stylistic perspectives from corpus-based approaches to cognitive approaches. The collection comprises 12 chapters grouped by discourse type: pop fiction, telecinematic discourse, pop music and lyrics, and cartoons and video games. Part 1: Pop Fiction includes chapters by Gregoriou (2022), who takes a cognitive-stylistic approach to analyse Peter Robinson’s A Dedicated Man, a crime fiction novel, and a chapter on televisual adaptation of pop fiction using corpus stylistics by Montoro (2022). Montoro’s chapter presents a rigorous corpus stylistic analysis of two pop culture texts: a novel and a TV series. Part 2, ‘Telecinematic Discourse’, comprises four chapters all exploring interaction and dialogue on screen. The first chapter in this section, written by Karpenko-Seccombe (2022), explores the features of interaction on the reality TV show Love Island UK. The subsequent chapters all focus on fictional interactions. The second chapter, by Reichelt (2022), focuses on the analysis of interaction on the TV show, Jane the Virgin, focussing specifically on the stylistic effects on multimodality and code-switching. The final two chapters explore interaction in movies. The first of these, by Schubert (2022) features an analysis of film dialogue in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight and how suspense is created through film dialogue. Finally, Hoffman (2022) uses frameworks from Conversation Analysis to explore turn-taking in phone call openings in films. Part 3 focusses on pop music and lyrics and features chapters by Jansen and Gerfer (2022) on the stylistic features of Alex Turner’s (lead singer of the Arctic Monkeys) use of an American accent, and a chapter by Werner (2022) on the stylistic development of Eminem’s lyrics. Verner’s work compares Eminem’s lyrics over time with a general corpus of Northern American rap in general. Like Montoro’s contribution, Verner’s chapter demonstrates the value of using corpus methods in stylistics. In the final part of the book, which focusses on cartoons and video games, Cutler (2022) adopts a socio-pragmatic analysis of the early twentieth-century print carton Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay to explore how language ideologies are propagated by cartoons and Stamenković (2022) explores multimodality in the Football Manager series before an afterword written by Toolan (2022). The collection constitutes a vital contribution to stylistics and is a fantastic resource for researchers and students alike. The variety of approaches taken in the book, combined with the range of discourse types analysed means that it will be of interest to very many researchers working within stylistics and beyond. The collection will be of particular interest to researchers interested in the interaction between stylistics and culture.
A further work which explores language within its social context is Virdis’ (2022) Ecological Stylistics: Ecostylistic Approaches to Discourses of Nature, the Environment and Sustainability. In this monograph, Virdis explores non-literary discourse on the topics of ecological issues and the environmental crisis. She argues that the book is the first of its kind to systematically apply the theoretical framework and methodology of ecostylistics. The book comprises eight chapters, with the first two providing a background to the work, to ecolinguistics, and the various ways stylistics can be used to study this discourse topic. Specifically, Virdis uses foregrounding, point of view and metaphor from stylistics. Chapters in the book have been designed to analyse the language used by five environmental organisations and agencies (Forestry England, Greenpeace International, National Park Service, Navdanya International, World Wide Fund for Nature). As a result, Ecological Stylistics will be of interest to stylisticians and climate researchers generally.
Carrying on the tradition in stylistics to analyse a wide range of text types, Carla Vergaro takes a pragmatic approach to explore two speech actions (blessing and cursing) in Puritan Sermons. Using John Winthrop’s A Modell of Christian Charity (1630) as a case study, Vergaro uses Schmid’s Entrenchment and Conventionalization Model (2018) to explore the syntagmatic similarities between the two speech acts. Arguing that the speech acts of blessing and cursing are a neglected area, Vergaro contends that understanding these two speech act types in sermons will help to understand how they contribute to the ‘enargetic rhetoric’ (Lunde, 2004: 49) of this text type.
Taking a semiotic approach to the study of neo-slave narratives, Brendon K. Vayo explores the representation of Margaret Garner (an enslaved woman who lived in 19th century America) via the reworking of Garner’s story in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In the article, Vayo argues that “Despite the impact traumas like Garner’s had on abolition, history largely forgets or ignores these gruesome details.” (2022: 19). Instead, Vayo argues that depictions of Garner contain racialist markers which work to obscure Garner’s image. Citing Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s artwork ‘The Modern Medea’ (1867), Vayo points to the depiction of Garner has having “a head wrap and wild eyes” (2022:19). In contrast, Vayo argues that Morrison’s depiction of Garner constitutes a historical account with icons to connote paradoxical significations’ which “embody complementary and yet oppositional significations without one privileged over the other” (2022:19). Vayo’s use of semiotics and non-iconology to explore Morrison’s reconfiguring of Garner provides a fascinating analysis of a neo-slave narrative but also demonstrates the value of semiotic analyses of literary texts and art.
3. Children’s literature
Just like research published in 2021, children’s literature was a key theme in the stylistics research published in 2022. The topic was the focus of a special issue of Language and Literature, edited by Michael Burke and Karen Coats. The special issue, titled ‘The Language, Style and Cognition of Children’s Literature’ (31/1) features six articles from academics across stylistic fields analysing literature for children. The chapters cover children’s literature aimed at a variety of ages, from books for toddlers to young adult fiction. In the first article, Burke and Coates (31/1) introduce the aims of the special issue and summarise the research done into this genre in stylistics over the last 20 years. The authors state that children’s literature is a relatively neglected text type in stylistics, and that “Stylistic methodology has much to offer the study of children’s literature”, because it “brings with it a whole arsenal of theories and frameworks that can be deployed to tease out implicit meanings” (31/1: 4).
The first article to demonstrate the value of stylistics in the analysis of children’s literature is Čermáková and Mahlberg (31/1) who explore gendered body language in children’s literature over time using a corpus of 19th century children’s literature. Comparing the corpus with a corpus of contemporary fiction, they explore clusters (strings of words) that contain at least one body part noun and a marker of gender, e.g. ‘his face’, ‘tears in her eyes’. Their analysis provides interesting new insight into themes in children’s literature such as that female gendered body part clusters (GBPC) seem to be less frequent overall in both corpora and that in historical children’s fiction, body language involving arms appears to be “particularly important for the description of female characters and a way to describe them in relation to others” (Čermáková and Mahlberg (31/1: 25). This is something that changes in the contemporary children’s literature corpus, where female GBPCs containing ‘arm(s)’ are much less frequent, indicating that perhaps girls and women in the contemporary fiction corpus are less likely to be touching, or reaching out for others. The authors link this finding to an increase in female assertiveness.
Elsewhere in the volume, Michael Burke explores meter, rhyme, rhythm and lexical repetition in the language of Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo (31/1/: 41). Drawing on his previous research in the area of rhetoric (2013), Burke argues that while grammatical repetition may be considered poor style, repetition is actually a desirable feature in rhetoric. Burke draws together analyses from stylistics, linguistics and rhetoric to provide a comprehensive account of why The Gruffalo is such a successful example of children’s literature.
Taking a rigorous, stylometric approach to their analysis, Haverals, Geybels and Joosen (31/1) explore the works of 10 Dutch and English ‘crosswriters’, or authors who write for both a child and adult audience, to explore differences across authors as well as across time and intended audience age. Amongst many engaging findings, the authors report that “a correlation of the stylistic similarities with the age of the intended reader is usually stronger than that with the period or genre” (31/1: 80). That is, books for young adults tend to be more similar to adult fiction than books for children (both late and early childhood).
The penultimate article in the special issue, written by Katie Wales (31/1), explores ‘narrative as rhetoric’ in Charles Dickens’ A Child’s History of England using Phelan’s (2017) framework for narrative as rhetoric. Wales argues that Dicken’s contribution to children’s literature is often overlooked, or, as is the case with A Child’s History of England, largely ignored. Wales’ contribution to the volume provides fascinating insight into the historical significance of Dickens' work as an author of works for juvenile audiences, but also the historical contexts in which Dickens was working, and how his role as playwright and actor affected his role as author. Characteristic of Wales’ style, the article is engaging and not only provides new insight into the stylistic features of Dickens' writing, it does so alongside an absorbing discussion of Dickens and his England through time.
The final contribution to the special issue, ‘Creativity and cognition in fiction by teenage leaners of English’ by Lydia Kokkola and Ulla Rydström (31/1), draws on cognitive narratology to explore how Swedish learners of English respond to a short story by Salmon Rushdie in their own creative writing. The authors state that the aim of the article is to “determine how the short story and task design promote creative cognition, and to identify where the learners reveal a lack of understanding or an over-reliance on stereotypes” (31/1: 100). Students in an L2 English classroom (15-16 years old) were tasked with a textual intervention task (Pope, 1995) to write a story ending to Rushdie’s Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies. Their research demonstrated that the students (15–16 years old) were familiar with the expectations of the short story genre, with many students ending the story with either a moral point (exemplum), or a moment-of-truth moment. The researchers also found that despite the students not sharing cultural experiences, or reference points with the fictional work, they were able to identify and reuse elements of Rushdie’s style. Specifically, pupils were able to “identify imagery (the use of bird images), aspects of characterisation (smiling and eye-gaze), descriptions of objects (knives, the bus) and recycle them in a way that signalled linguistic alignment” (31/1: 116).
4. Corpus and computational stylistics
In 2022, there was also much research in stylistics adopting the corpus linguistic methodology. An example of this is Rebora & Salgaro’s (31/2) work, titled ‘Is Felix Salten the author of the Mutzenbacher novel (1906)? Yes and no’’. In the article, the authors use computational methods and methods from stylometry to conduct an authorship analysis of Josefine Mutzenbacher. The novel has often been attributed to Felix Salten (the author of Bambi) but this attribution has been contested. Using 1200 different stylometric methods to compare the style of seven candidate authors, the authors establish that Salten is the most likely author, although their analysis reveals that the final pages of the novel could not be attributed to any of the disputed authors. They argue that this perhaps indicates that Salten left the text unfinished before the ending was ghost-written by an unidentified author.
Adopting Biber’s (1988) Multi-Dimensional Analysis (MDA), Isobelle Clarke (31/2) analyses a corpus of English tweets to explore common patterns of linguistic variation. In the article, Clarke describes a renovation of MDA for the analysis of short texts (Biber’s original conception of MDA required longer passages of texts as relative frequency forms the basis of comparison). This approach to MDA, what Clarke terms a ‘short-text version of MDA’ (31/2: 214), reveals significant linguistic variation in the Twitter data, which Clarke claims is rich in language used for self-commodification, e.g. self-reporting and self-promotion.
Adopting methods from critical stylistics and taking a corpus linguistic approach is Price’s (2022) monograph The Language of Mental Illness: Corpus Linguistics and the Construction of Mental Illness in the Press. 2 The book explores the language used by the British press to discuss mental health and illness over a 30-year period. Adopting methods used in (critical) stylistics such as transitivity analysis and speech and thought presentation, combined with corpus methods, the book explores the change in terms used to refer to mental illness over time, as well as stylistic norms when discussing mental health topics. The book includes chapters on key methods used and corpus compilation procedures, as well as analytical chapters on key areas of mental health and illness discourse. Analysis chapters describe an investigation into what the terms ‘mental health’ and ‘mental illness’ refer to in the press and how people with mental illness are named in the press. Also included are lexicogrammatical analyses of terms promoted by anti-stigma organisations such as ‘experience’ compared with terms thought to be stigmatising such as ‘suffer’. The book incorporates a discussion of the applications of such stylistic work and how linguistic analysis can be used to inform policy. The book is designed to be of interest to corpus stylisticians as well as those working within critical stylistics.
Also adopting corpus methods is Wijitsopon (31/3) who uses corpus stylistics to explore colour symbolism in The Great Gatsby and three Thai translations of the novel. In the article, Wijitsopon clearly outlines the aims of the corpus stylistic analysis: to explore the relationship between colour words and their symbolic interpretation and to investigate how these colour terms are rendered in the Thai translations (31/3: 267). Several colour words are identified as key in the novel, including ‘white’, ‘grey’, ‘yellow’ and ‘lavender’. Wijitsopon argues that as well as being symbolically interesting (e.g. colour terms allow the reader to gain deeper interpretations of a character’s personality), colour terms are also of great interest to the translator as these terms can be culturally specific. For example, Wijitsopon points to the fact that, when translated into Thai, the ‘grey’ in ‘grey hair’ does not necessarily convey old age (31/3: 271). The article reports key patterns between colour terms and themes in the novel, including that grey symbolises spiritual emptiness in the English text, but such colour symbolism is not translated in the Thai translations, e.g. ‘grey scrawny Italian child’ is translated as ‘dark-tone skin’ (31/3: 283). Wijitsopon’s systematic analysis demonstrates the patterned nature of colour terms, as well as the value of exploring colour terms to explore the thematic meanings of novels and how such meanings may be translated.
5. Reader response
A key area of contemporary stylistic research is reader response studies. Examples of research in this area are Kuijpers (2022) work, which features in the special issue of the Journal of Literary Semantics dedicated to the work of David Miall. In the article, Kuijpers adopts Text World Theory (TWT) to explore bodily involvement in readers’ online book reviews. Specifically, Kuijper’s describes a case study of a review to the romance author Jennifer Crusie’s book Bet Me. Kuijpers demonstrates that the social context in which the review was written affects the expression of narrative absorption. Also in the special issue, De Jonge et al. (2022) explore the concept of negative empathy. In their research, they explore readers empathic reactions to Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (2006), which details the memories of an SS-Officer. Using extracts from the novel, the researchers tested the reactions of 104 readers in two conditions: one where the extract was presented as fiction, and another where the extract was presented as autobiography. The researchers found that fictionalisation has a significant effect on readers’ ‘moral disengagement’, and relatedly, on the level of empathy the reader has for the protagonist of the novel.
Other research exploring reader responses was conducted by Papp-Zipernovszky et al. (31/3) and published in Language and Literature. Combining literary theory and cognitive psychology, their research explores emotional responses to poetry reading, specifically three Shakespearean sonnets. The researchers adopted a mix-method approach, combining the Neurocognitive Poetics Model with the textual Foregrounding Assessment Matrix to predict the differences in foregrounding potential in the poems. Based on their findings, they state that “the type of foregrounding is more important than the number of foregrounded elements” (31/1: 296). They also argue that “Multi-method, interdisciplinary research of this kind contributes to improving our understanding of the potentially unique mechanisms involved in poetry reception (31/1: 296). In further work in this area, Martine van Driel (31/2) explored listener reviews of a true crime comedy podcast. Focussing on genre studies, van Driel makes the case that in contrast to previous genre studies research, which states that expert discourse community members “possess professional expertise in genre styles” (31/2: 150), non-expert, ordinary audiences are also able to use their conceptions of genre to evaluate texts. Using a particularly interesting data type, the dual-genre true-crime, comedy podcast, ‘My Favourite Murder’, van Driel demonstrates that negative reviews tend to view the podcast as comprising two distinct genres, whereas positive reviews view the podcast as being an example of a single, new genre. Linking reader responses to our next section on cognitive approaches to stylistics, Marcello Giovanelli (31/3) explores reader responses to Mary Borden’s Belgium, using Langacker’s cognitive grammar. Giovanelli adopts qualitative and quantitative (Likert scales) methods to explore how verb forms, particularly progressive forms like -ing, affect readers’ perceived closeness to events in the story. Belgium is a short story in a collection by Borden titled The Forbidden Zone. In the book, Borden describes her time in Flanders and the Somme in the First World War. Knowing this, the depiction of space and landscape, Giovanelli notes, is an important element of the stories. In order to test the link between the -ing form and perceived proximity to the process being described, Giovanelli explores how the text facilitates an ‘embodied perspective’ (31/1: 414). Via a Likert questionnaire and the collection of verbal data from 16 participants, Giovanelli found that more -ing forms had relatively little effect on reader’s perceptions of closeness. Rather, other textual features, e.g. the use of adjectives in the text and the use of rhetorical questions by the narrator, had a bigger effect for the readers. He argues that these findings indicate that more empirical research needs to be done to test some of the claims made by cognitive grammar.
6. Cognitive stylistics
As in previous years, stylistic research adopting cognitive approaches has been extensive. A notable publication in 2022 was Jane Lugea’s article ‘Dementia mind styles in contemporary narrative fiction’ (31/2). Lugea’s research constitutes the first large-scale study into dementia mind styles in contemporary literature (published within the last 35 years). Using a bespoke corpus comprising 390,000 words, and adopting a mixed-method approach, Lugea’s research provides new insight into understandings of mind-style in stylistics. Specifically, in exploring characters with dementia, Lugea’s research sheds light on how stylisticians conceptualise mind style. She writes: The majority of mind style research has focused on its creation at the local level, despite the fact it arises discursively. This fact is particularly pertinent to characters with dementia, as memory loss is indicated across stretches of text, by switching between present and past memories, or in the development of an unreliable narrator (31/2: 184)
Lugea’s research widens the concept of mind style, outlining new, discursive features of this notion.
In addition to Lugea’s research on mind style, Stockwell (2022a) also explores fictional minds in his article, ‘Mind-modelling literary personas’. Published as part of the special issue for David Miall in Journal of Literary Semantics, Stockwell analyses Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. In the article, Stockwell revisits key developments in Miall’s work, linking his early thinking on cognitive approaches to the analysis of literature to recent developments in cognitive stylistics, e.g. the cognitive grammar of Langacker (2001). Focussing on the final two lines of the text (which have been the focus of much debate, specifically debate around who ‘says’ the lines), Stockwell puts forward five readings of the final part of the text, ultimately arguing that Keats intended the work to be multivalent. Also linking to Miall’s work, specifically his work on foregrounding, Sopcak and Kuiken (2022) discuss Miall’s work, connecting it to Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of ostranenie (or ‘making strange’). They state their aim in the work as being to “rescue the notion of foregrounding from the prevailing focus on defamiliarization” (2022: 75). They argue that foregrounding is better understood via a phenomenological approach.
In her 2022 article, ‘Literary dynamics in The PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood’ (31/3), Irene O’Leary explores the interaction between stylistic processes and microcognitive processes. O’Leary argues that despite the fact that the novels have received much critical commentary, such commentary has not been stylistic, but rather thematic. Focussing on “the role of dynamic interactions of fast subconscious microcognition with stylistic processes and the impacts of these interactions on narrative and interpretation” (31/3: 326), O’Leary analyses two ‘narrative moments’ from the works, arguing that “high densities of stylistic and microcognitive interactions and perturbations, or disturbances, generate frequent narrative and interpretive changes during reading” (31/3: 326). Another example of work in cognitive stylistics published in 2022 is Riyukta Raghunath’s, ‘Possible worlds theory, accessibility relations, and counterfactual historical fiction’ (2022). In the article, Raghunath explores how existing typologies of possible worlds, specifically Ryan’s (1991a, 1991b) work, can be applied to counterfactual historical fiction. Raghunath argues that the most relevant categories in Ryan's typology of possible worlds, ‘historical confabulation’ and ‘science fiction’, do not account for some of the key genre elements of historical fiction. In light of this, Ranghunath presents a modified version of Ryan’s (1991) model which can be applied to counterfactual historical fiction.
Also working within cognitive stylistics, Kimberly Pager-McClymont explores pathetic fallacy in her work, ‘Linking emotions to surroundings: a stylistic model of pathetic fallacy’ (31/3). Pager-McClymont states that the aim of the research is to provide a stylistically founded model of pathetic fallacy (PF), making the point that previous research on PF is literary, rather than linguistic. Furthermore, Pager-McClymant points out that despite the fact that PF is a term often used in schools for the examination of English Literature, there is no consensus on the definition of the concept (31/3: 428). In order to explore PF, Pager-McClymont uses survey data collected from GCSE and A-Level English teachers, combined with (cognitive) stylistic models in order to develop a framework for analysing PF. Pager-McClymant’s work is of great stylistic interest, but also helps to address inconsistences in the teaching and assessment of PF as a device. As Pager-McClymant writes, “the inconsistency surrounding the concept directly impacts teachers and students, and one could wonder how such inconsistencies impact students’ grades” (31/3: 442).
Finally, in the first of two publications by the author, Eri Shigematsu (31/2) explores present tense narration in Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (Smith, 2014). Specifically, Shigematsu explores the narrative effects of using present-tense narration. In the article, Shigematsu states that present tense has become more commonplace in contemporary narratives since it allows for the development of narrative plot lines, but that prior to this “using the present tense to describe events at the story level of narrative was regarded as incongruous with the traditional story-telling convention of‘ live now and tell later’, in which the present tense is generally associated with the narrator’s deictic centre at the level of discourse” (31/2: 227). Using Smith’s How to Be Both, Shigematsu argues that present-tense narrative has various functions, and emphasises that one function of present-tense narration is that it eliminates the temporal distances between the narrating time and the narrated time, which creates a sense of immediacy by “levelling to the two time frames” (31/2: 239).
Again, focussing on tense, Shigematsu (2022) explores past-tense narratives in an article published in the Journal of Literary Semantics titled ‘How do characters perceive their world? Representation of perception from traditional past-tense narrative to contemporary present-tense narrative’. In the article, Shigematsu argues that research to date has paid relatively little attention to characters’ perceptual consciousness. The author argues that perception plays a key role in narrative, and is therefore important to study. In the article, Shigematsu outlines a linguistic paradigm for perception representation.
7. Pedagogical stylistics
In 2022, Sonia Zyngier and Greg Watson contributed to the area of pedagogical stylistics via their edited collection Pedagogical Stylistics in the 21st Century (Zyngier and Watson, 2022). The book comprises four sections: ‘Assessing and Broadening the Scope of Pedagogical Stylistics’, ‘Cognitive Perspectives’, ‘Reader Engagement and Feelings’ and ‘Innovations in the Educational Setting’. The aims of the volume include to review research and developments in pedagogical stylistics as well as to foreground evidenced-based studies. The constituent chapters, each written by prominent academics in the area, certainly do this. The first section features a chapter from Hall (2022), who provides a survey review of research in pedagogical stylistics since 2007 (as an update to Watson and Zyngier, 2007), as well as a chapter by Sotirova (2022) titled ‘Pedagogical stylistics and the integration of literary and linguistic criticism’ in which she argues that stylistic analysis is greatly enriched by insight from literary criticism. Particularly, Sotirova makes the case that historical and contextual approaches to text analysis (typically more widely adopted in literary criticism) can illuminate stylistic meaning. In Chapter 3, David I. Hanauer argues that analyses of political texts in the stylistics classroom have much wider applications than just within the classroom. Proposing pedagogical stylistics as a ‘course-based research experience (CURE)’ (2022: 55), Hanauer argues that stylistic analyses of political discourse can play a vital role in democratic processes. In the final chapter of the first section, Bridle and McIntyre (2022) describe the results of an experiment carried out during the teaching of a short corpus stylistics course delivered to English for General Academic Purposes (EAP) students in Japan. Using findings from their empirical study, Bridle and McIntyre argue that the course, which was designed to assist in the teaching of style and register, empowered students to become aware of different style and register norms across a range of discourse types. Moreover, they show that the course aided the students’ writing skills.
In Section two, ‘Cognitive Perspectives’, which has the aim of bringing together developments in cognitive approaches over the past 10 years, Stockwell (2022b) provides an engaging discussion about the role of introspection in pedagogical stylistics. In the chapter, Stockwell makes a case for a “redefinition of text in terms of its moments and momentum” (107: 2022b) in his analyses of Romeo and Juliet, and a novel by Evelyn Waugh. Stockwell argues that experiential elements of textuality, such as memory and feeling are at the heart of stylistic analysis. Following on from Stockwell’s work, Giovanelli and Harrison (2022) report on how cognitive grammar can be used in the classroom, specifically the secondary English classroom. They argue that due to the complexity of cognitive grammar, it has not been widely adopted in the school-level teaching. In the chapter, Giovanelli and Harrison reflect on their work reconceptualising the grammar for use in the classroom in collaboration with teacher knowledge. Also addressing how cognitive stylistics can be used for younger students of stylistics, Cushing (2022) describes a project aimed at teaching 12–13-year-olds TWT. TWT, Cushing argues, is an accessible way to bring stylistics to the classroom. In the final chapter of Section 2, Esmeralda V. Bon and Michael Burke present their research exploring how university students read literature via electronic means since the rise of e-readers. Their findings indicate that students still ‘engage in traditional literary reading behaviour’ (2022: 183), but found that students diversified their reading locations, and tended to use digital reading devices out of necessity (2022: 183).
The penultimate section of the book, ‘Reader Engagement and Feelings’ includes empirical reader response research by Frank Hakemulder. In the chapter, Hakemulder (2022) outlines some of the neglected areas of previous work on reader response, including the fact that demographic variables of the reader are often not accounted for, e.g. the social class or gender of the reader. Hakemulder also outlines guidelines for conducting studies that explore reader responses. Following on from Hakemulder’s work, Chesnokova and Zyngier (2022) explore the use of translated poems in EFL settings. They argue that very few studies have been conducted to date which explore translated poems in EFL literature classrooms. Using three translations of Poe’s The Lake, the researchers explore the reactions of 500 students of language and literature to the translated poems compared with the original poem. On the basis of their findings, they argue that teachers ought to be aware of the impact that the translation process can have on stylistic effect. In the final chapter of Section 2, Mason (2022) reports on her research which explores how teachers’ reading histories affect their identities as teachers of English. Offering a survey of previous research between reading and identity, Mason provides an engaging and thought-provoking analysis of 300 anonymous reports by teachers into their experiences of embarrassment in relation to their reading histories.
In the final section of the book, ‘Innovations in the Educational Setting’, Spiro (2022) explores the links between professional and academic writing. In the chapter, Spiro reports on how a discourse approach to writing affected the writing development of students across nine university cohorts between 2011 and 2019. On the basis of the study, Spiro argues that “a scaffolded approach to discourse combined with reflection into personal writing voice can enable writers to acquire ownership of their target writing community” (2022: 289). Following on from Spiro’s work, Paul Sevigny explores teaching methods in EFL classrooms in this chapter ‘Revising Role-Based Literature Circles for EFL Classrooms’ (2022: 315). In the chapter, Sevigny reports on his own experience as a EFL program coordinator in Japan to offer an appraisal of this teaching method. Moreover, Sevigny provides several examples of best practice when adopting role-based literature circles as a teaching method. In the final chapter, Yoshida et al. (2022) conduct a qualitative stylistic analysis of Japanese EFL learners’ writing. In the chapter, they argue that stylistics is a valuable method for evaluating and improving ESL learners’ writing. Yoshida et al’s chapter is followed by a clear afterword written by Michael Toolan, who brings together the themes covered in the chapters as well as providing an overview of where pedagogical stylistics is in 2022. Pedagogical Stylistics in the 21st Century is an excellent contribution to the pedagogical stylistics literature and includes research projects on wide-ranging topics in this area. The chapters are accessible, empirically grounded and engaging, with many chapters providing overviews of research conducted since the publication of Watson and Zyngier in 2007 in their relative areas. Knowing this, the book clearly addresses its core aims. The collection will be of interest to a wide range of scholars within pedagogical stylistics as well as those working in cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics and EFL. The collection ought also to be of interest to educational policymakers and educators.
Also in the area of pedagogical stylistics is John Gordon’s (31/3) article exploring intertextuality, titled ‘A pedagogical stylistics of intertextual interaction: Talk as Heteroglot Intertextual Study in higher education pedagogy’. In the article, Gordan uses methods from pedagogical stylistics combined with conversation analysis to investigate how teachers and students “interconnect texts to perform analysis of a focal text in seminar discussion” (31/3: 383). Using data taken from a conversation between a tutor and a student in an undergraduate seminar discussion of Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond (2016), Gordon analyses instances in the discussion where the participants invoked intertextual voices. Gordan argues that the invocation of intertextual voices in text analysis helps students to develop insight into texts (31/3: 401) and proposes a new term: ‘Talk as Heteroglot Intertextual Study (THIS) to describe this type of literary study.
Also exploring stylistics in the classroom are Bauer et al. (31/3) who introduce a measure for testing university students’ comprehension of literary texts. Using Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43 as a focus text, the researchers assessed the level to which 430 university students of English as a second language understood the poem as well as their ability to reflect on their own comprehension skills. They found that students who read literary texts often exhibited a higher level of text comprehension, and that students who had previously read Shakespeare and who read literary texts often were also better able to reflect on their own processes of comprehension.
8. Poetry
The stylistics of poetry was a key area in stylistics in 2022, with three significant monographs published in this area. The first of these was Jeffries’ (2022) monograph The Language of Contemporary Poetry: A Framework for Poetic Analysis. The work is divided into three sections whose titles will be familiar to those stylisticians who have followed Jeffries’ earlier work on critical stylistics. In this book, Jeffries states her aims as to “contribute to our knowledge about language and specifically about the language of a specific kind of text, the lyric poem”. The first section of the book, titled ‘Core Features of Textual Meaning’, is broken down into various chapters each addressing one of Jeffries’ ‘textual conceptual functions’ (TCFs). These are ‘naming and describing’, ‘representing processes’, ‘prioritising’ and ‘representing time space and society’ in poetry. Part 2, ‘Intermittent Features of Textual Meaning’, includes chapters on the TCFs that she terms as ‘more peripheral’, but which are (due to their intermittence) more significant. Chapter topics in this section include how equivalence and opposition are created in poems, lists and open meaning in poems, the use of negation in poems and how multiple voices are used in poetry. The final section in the book provides readers with an integrated analysis of poems, before a summary chapter devoted to linguistic theory and the stylistics of poetry. The monograph constitutes a thorough and systematic toolkit for analysing poems. As is typical of Jeffries’ work, the book is accessible and engaging. The book will be of great interest to stylisticians interested in poetry, but also those researchers who want to explore aesthetic meaning across a range of text types.
Another key text on the language of poetry is Giovanelli’s (2022) The Language of Siegfried Sassoon. Building on his past work on Sassoon, as well as his work on cognitive approaches to stylistics, Giovanelli presents a cognitive analysis of Sassoon’s poetry, arguing that such an approach reveals the multifaceted and complex themes in Sassoon’s work. The book features a general introduction, followed by a chapter dedicated to cognitive grammar. Following on from these introductory chapters are five chapters, each covering a theme in Sassoon’s work. These are ‘observation’, a chapter which explores Sassoon’s verse during his time in the trenches, ‘trauma’ which explores Sassoon’s work using trauma theory, and ‘blame’ which analyses Sassoon’s protest poetry via analysing keywords across Sassoon’s 1918 collection Counter-Attack and Other Poems. Other chapters in the book are ‘Revision’, which focusses on Sassoon’s autobiographical prose, and ‘Reflection’ which uses cognitive grammar to assess how Sassoon’s style changed across his poetry from 1927 to 1957. The final concluding chapter ‘Conclusion: Reading ‘Everyone Sang’, brings together the key ideas in the book and reports on a reader response study. Each of the chapters in the main body of the book feature example analyses, and as such the more complex aspects of cognitive grammar are well-exemplified. The book will be of great interest to stylisticians interested in poetry and cognitive grammar, as well as those interested in war poetry.
Also published in 2022 was Van Peer and Chesnokova’s (2022) Experiencing Poetry: A Guidebook to Psychopoetics. The book explores the ways that readers experience poetry, offering a methodology for revealing poetic effects (e.g. the emotional and behavioural effects of poetry). The authors describe the book as introducing an evidenced-based approach to the analysis of the effects of poetic form and content. Indeed, a key strength of the book is the focus on scientific enquiry. For example, readers are guided through key concepts associated with experimental approaches such as averages, deviation, and outliers. The book also contains a glossary, ancillary resources, and questionnaire samples. The book includes nine accessible chapters which feature keywords at the start to provide the reader with insight into what the chapter discusses. Chapters 1–7 follow a similar naming strategy, e.g. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 are titled ‘Poetry is Structure’ and ‘Poetry is Madness’, respectively. Chapter 8 outlines methods to study psychopoetics and Chapter 9 provides a ‘general theory of psychopoetics’. While the book is aimed at students of stylistics, it will be of great interest to stylisticians and literature scholars more generally who want to ensure their work is rooted in methodologically sound science. The book provides an excellent introduction to empirical research in stylistics via engaging examples.
9. Theses
In this section, PhD theses submitted by postgraduate students are described. As stated earlier, theses submitted from UK institutions are overrepresented in this section due to the relative lack of availability of theses submitted in countries other than the UK.
Kayla Kemhadjian (University of Leeds, UK, Supervisors Iona McCleery and Dr Alaric Hall) explores the language of suicide in Old English (OE) and early medieval English (c. 00-1150) (Kemhadijan, 2022). Focussing on semantics and rhetoric, Kemhadjian adopts a historical linguistic approach to analyse literary and linguistic data. In the thesis, Kemhadjian outlines several conceptual metaphors for self-killing in OE such as
Also exploring metaphor, Tania Castro Rodea (University College London, UK, Supervisors Stephen M. Hart and Geraldine Horan) explores two translations of La muerte de Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes, published in English under the title The Death of Artemio Cruz (Castro Rodea, 2022). In the thesis, Castro Rodea explores the metaphors used in the original and the translation with the aim of identifying how metaphorical components convey culture-specific information. Castro Rodea, who is working from a translation perspective, makes the case that exploring metaphor in real texts (compared with fabricated examples) is novel in translation studies.
In further work on metaphor, Laura Elisabeth Matthews (Princeton University, USA, Supervisor Ilya Vinitsky) explored metaphors for education used by three nineteenth-century Russian writers: Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov, and Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. Matthews does this on the basis that investigating these metaphors provides insight into the worldview of the writers. Matthews explores several metaphors in the thesis, including Pushkin’s ‘school of life’ metaphor in his memorandum on national education. Matthews argues that the thesis illustrates the importance of pedagogy for nineteenth-century Russian writers (Matthews, 2022).
Jonathan Neil Fitchett (University of Kent, UK, Supervisor Jeremy Scott) explores how successful real, spontaneous dialogue is when added to scripts for dramatic performance (Fitchett, 2022). Using methods from stylistics, cognitive poetics, and narratology, combined with conversation theory, Fitchett explores real, spontaneous dialogue with a view to developing a toolkit for playwrights. The thesis also explores what the term ‘theatricality’ refers to, as well as how actor improvisation may be used as a writing tool.
Oltjona Totoni (Lancaster University, UK, Supervisors Véronique Lane and Amit Thakkar) explored the fictional constructed language of Nadsat in their thesis titled Alienese Translation: Anthony Burgess’s Nadsat in A Clockwork Orange (Totoni, 2022). In the thesis, Totoni explores how Nadsat has been translated into NadSpanish in the Spanish translations of A Clockwork Orange. Totoni explores the features of Nadsat in the thesis (derivations, slang, eponyms, etc.) before investigating how features of Nadsat have been omitted in the translated texts. Totoni argues that these omissions contribute to a distortion of the text and impact the dystopian aspects of the text.
Fabien Jean-Jacques Troivaux (University of St Andrews, UK, Supervisor Jane Stabler) investigates how Jane Austen’s style developed over time, using examples of her writing from three time periods (her early fiction and other juvenilia), her later unpublished fiction (her later works) and two chapters of Persuasion (Troivaux, 2022), Troivaux argues that touch and the haptic were a theme in her early works, but were less present in her later fiction and correspondence. However, these themes resurfaced in Persuasion. Troivaux notes that references to the haptic, whilst part of Austen’s ‘writerly instinct’ only remain in critical narrative moments in the final drafts of her work.
Adopting a cognitive stylistic approach, Megan Mansworth (Aston University, UK, Supervisor Marcello Giovanelli) investigates readers’ emotional experiences of literature (Mansworth, 2022). In the thesis, Mansworth conducts a reader response study to explore how three twentieth-century novels originally written in English elicit readers emotions. Mansworth outlines a typology of textual and actual words which she uses to conduct an analysis of the readers’ responses to the texts. Mansworth argues that Possible Worlds Theory can provide new insight into the study of readers emotions.
Weilai Xu (Bournemouth University, UK, Supervisors Fred Charles, Charlie Hargood and Wen Tang) explores the possibility of using a pre-trained language model to generate dialogue with embedded narrative features within the context of narrative films (Xu, 2022). Using both automatic metrics and human evaluation, Xu’s work assesses the quality of the dialogue generated, taking into account personality traits of characters and film genres. Xu reports in the thesis that the model is able to generate dialogues which accurately reflect the target personality. It is also noted in the thesis that a negative correlation between personality identification accuracy and dialogue quality is observed in the human judgement studies.
Also adopting computational methods to inform literary analysis, Mark Boardman (University of Huddersfield, UK, Supervisor Dan McIntyre; PhD awarded posthumously) conducts a corpus-informed analysis of Emily Dickinson’s fascicle poems. Using a corpus of 818 of Dickenson’s fascicle poems, Boardman investigates the possibility of combining literary criticism, corpus linguistics and computational techniques to identify the significance of syntactic markers in the poems (Boardman, 2022).
Sina Movaghati (Heidelberg University, Germany, Supervisor Dietmar Schloss) explores moments of recognition in contemporary transatlantic novels (Movaghati, 2022). Arguing that recognition is an undertheorised concept despite the fact that it is a key element of narrative structure, Movaghati focuses on Aristotelian recognition, or anagnorisis. In the thesis, Movaghati explores recognition in Henry James’ work, as well as in later modern works such as Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and McEwan’s Atonement.
Working in the field of popular music and folklore, Charlotte Doesburg, (University College London, UK, Supervisor Titus Hjelm), explored how the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic, and other Finnish folk poetry is adapted into metal music lyrics from Finland (Doesburg, 2022). In her thesis, Doesburg categorises the lyrics according to a taxonomy based on the methods of adaptation. These adaptation types include: transposition (direct quotations, direct use of names, etc.), commentary (retelling a story in different words), analogous transformation (a new story is told about a character/place, etc.) and stylistic imitation (stylistic aspects of the folk poetry are adapted, e.g. metre, alliteration). Doesburg finds that lyrics contained allusions to folk poetry through direct references, e.g. to place names, but also through the use of the traditional Kalevala metre.
Also investigating the language of folktales, Suha Fawzi D Abdo (University of Leeds, UK, Supervisor James Dickins) explores translation and framing strategies in three anthologies of translated Palestinian oral tales (Abdo, 2022). Using narrative theory, Abdo explores how Palestinian cultural identity and historical identity are framed in the tales, as well as how Orientalist narratives of Palestine are constructed and contested. In the thesis, Abdo investigates the stylistic features of Palestinian folktales as well as difficulties that arise when translating culture-specific items in the folktales.
Nojang Khatami (University of British Columbia, Canada, Supervisor Mark Warren) investigates narratives of democratic agency, stating that such creative means can be used to contest exclusion and dominance (Khatami 2022). In the thesis Khatami argues that such narratives of exclusion have typically been based on the political experiences of the west. In the thesis, Khatami responds to this, using a narratological method to analyse narratives of exclusion and domination from western and non-western experience.
Gillian Wallis (University of Sheffield, UK, Supervisors Sara Whiteley and Richard Steadman-Jones) uses cognitive poetics to investigate meaning-making by poets and writers (Wallis, 2022). Wallis collected questionaries and commentaries from poets and writers on their work before gathering 21 readers’ responses to the poems. In the thesis, the feedback given in the reader response data is compared with the poets’ and writers’ own descriptions of the intended meaning of their work. Wallis argues that this approach provides empirical evidence of meaning making practices from the perspectives of text producers and receivers. Wallis states that the findings of the research demonstrate that authorial intention is underacknowledged in the existing cognitive poetics literature.
Also exploring authorial intention, Shaun James Russell (University of Ohio, US, Supervisor Hannibal Hamlin), argues that the move away from questions of intention and a focus on the interpretation of texts has actually resulted in the role of intention being neglected in contemporary literary analysis (Russell, 2022). Focussing on four editions of mid-17th century poetry, Russell explores how the intentions of authors influence how the works can be interpreted. In the thesis, Russell argues that taking account of intention can enrich interpretation, not preclude it.
10. Conclusion
As is always the case when I am tasked with reviewing a year’s work in stylistics, I am heartened by the range of text types, methods adopted and theories developed in our field. It is also encouraging to see how much contemporary research in stylistics still abides by the empirical approach set out by David Miall, and how the range of texts analysed attests to the international focus of stylistics. Moreover, looking back to the early aims of the founders of Language and Literature, it is clear to see that stylistics is still in good health and that its status as a globally recognised area of study is cemented.
Looking to the ‘Year’s Work in Stylistics 2023′, there is a range of exciting works to look forward to. These include Gerard Steen’s (2023) Slowing Metaphor Down Elaborating Deliberate Metaphor Theory, Alison Gibbons’ and Elizabeth King’s edited collection Reading the Contemporary Author Narrative, Authority, Fictionality, and Jane Lugea and Brian Walker’s Stylistics: Text, Cognition and Corpora (2023). Along with other publications from 2023, these titles will be reviewed in the next ‘Year’s Work in Stylistics’ which will detail all the new and exciting ways that stylistics is being used across the world.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.