1st Edition

Language, Text and Context Essays in stylistics

Edited By Michael Toolan Copyright 1992
    334 Pages
    by Routledge

    332 Pages
    by Routledge

    First published in 1992, this wide-ranging collection of essays focuses on the principle of contextualisation as it applies to the interpretation, description, theorising and reading of literary and non-literary texts. The collection aims to reveal the interdependencies between theory, analysis, text and context by challenging the myth that stylistics entails a fundamental separation of text from context, linguistic description from descriptive interpretation, or language from situation. The essays cover a historically diverse set of texts, from Puttenham to Colemanballs, and a number of language-sensitive topics such as post-modernism, irony, newspaper representations, gender and narrative.

    List of tables and figures; Notes on contributors; Preface and acknowledgements; Part I Situated fashions of speaking and writing: from nonsense to common sense; 1 Making (non)sense of postmodernist poetry Brian McHale 2 Insider reading and linguistics form: contextual knowledge and the reading of linguistic discourse George Dillon 3 Grammaticalizing the medical case history Gill Francis and Anneliese Kramer Dahl 4 Reconstructing the interpretative conventions of Elizabethan readers Eugene R. Kintgen; Part II Strategic Styles; 5 Free indirect discourse in the eighteenth-century English novel: speakable or unspeakable? The example of Sir Charles Grandison Anne Waldron Naumann 6 Lexicogrammar and the reader: three examples from Dickens Norman Macleod; Part III Positioning styles: framing women in language; 7 Power and mutuality in Middlemarch Marie Paule Hastert and Jean Jacques Weber 8 Knowing your place: a Marxist feminist stylistic analysis Sara Mills 9 The linguistics of blame: representations of women in the The Sun’s reporting of crimes of sexual violence Kate Clark 10 Gender, genre and generative grammar: deconstructing the matrimonial column Rukmini Bhaya Nair; Part IV: Styles of incongruity: the pragmatics of oddness and daftness; 11 Pragmatic principles in Shaw’s You Never Can Tell Geoffrey Leach 12 The pragmatics of nonsense: towards a stylistics of Private Eye’s Colemanballs Paul Simpson; Bibliography; Index

    Biography

    Michael Toolan