The Language and Literature Reader

The Language and Literature Reader is the first collection in over a decade to address the study of the linguistic foundations and components of literature. Encompassing essays by key thinkers in linguistics such as Katie Wales, Michael Toolan, and Paul Simpson, as well as major figures in literary studies such as Derek Attridge and David Lodge, the Reader is divided into three main sections:

• foundations - explores the beginnings of the discipline of stylistics, drawing on the work of scholars in the field of both language and literary studies
• developments - examines the expansion of the discipline across major literary genres as new practices and theories were developed in the 1980s and 1990s
• new directions - introduces recent approaches including literary linguistic analysis of point of view, the relationship between language and literary context, and cognitive poetics.

The conclusion is a stylistics manifesto in which the editors view developments in the light of directions in linguistic and literary theory and textual analysis.