Teaching Stylistics

Understanding language and its capacity to create literary effects is vital for any student of English. Stylistics, the linguistic study of literary texts, has a key role to play in literary criticism. This book covers the theory and practice of teaching stylistics, focusing on the value of objectivity, rigour and replicability in text analysis.

This volume is a collection of original essays focusing on the key pedagogical issues behind the teaching of stylistics. Featuring contributions from authors based in the UK, Europe and overseas, it offers an international overview of how stylistics is currently taught and how the teaching of the discipline might be developed in the future. The volume is divided into two main sections, dealing respectively with larger theoretical issues in the teaching of stylistics and examples of classroom practice and detailed text analysis. In addition, the appendices provide an overview of the history of stylistics in the form of a timeline, short biographies of significant figures in the field and substantial lists of further reading. Teaching Stylistics will be of value to postgraduates new to teaching as well as established teachers, particularly those working at the interface between language and literary studies.