The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics

The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics provides a comprehensive introduction and reference point to key areas in the field of stylistics. The four sections of the volume encompass a wide range of approaches from classical rhetoric to cognitive neuroscience and cover core issues that include:

• historical perspectives centring on rhetoric, formalism and functionalism
• the elements of stylistic analysis that include the linguistic levels of foregrounding, relevance theory, conversation analysis, narrative, metaphor, speech acts, speech and thought presentation and point of view
• current areas of ‘hot topic’ research, such as cognitive poetics, corpus stylistics and feminist/critical stylistics
• emerging and future trends including the stylistics of multimodality, creative writing, hypertext fiction and neuroscience

Each of the thirty-two chapters is written by a specialist in the field and provides: an introduction to the subject; an overview of the history of the topic; an analysis of the main current and critical issues; a section with recommendations for practice, and a discussion of possible future trajectory of the subject.

The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics is essential reading for researchers, postgraduates and undergraduate students working in this area.

Michael Burke is Professor of Rhetoric at University College Roosevelt (Utrecht University). His books include Literary Reading Cognition and Emotion (2011) and Pedagogical Stylistics (eds. Burke et al, 2012). He is a former Chair of the International Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA).