Essential study guides for the future linguist. The Language of Literature is a general introduction to the methods and principles behind stylistics. It is suitable for advanced level students and beyond. Written with input from the Cambridge English Corpus, it provides students with an introduction to stylistics with texts from different genres. It takes the approach that the best way to study literary texts is to focus closely on language. Using short activities to help explain analysis methods, this book guides students through major modern issues and concepts. It summarises key concerns and findings, while providing inspiration for language investigations and non-examined assessments (NEAs) with research suggestions.

Essays discuss realism, futurism, Dada, the grammar of poetry, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Yeats, Turgenev, Pasternak, Blake, and semiotic theory.

There is a marked awareness about the language of literature and its meaning both in Indian and Western aesthetic thinking. The aestheticians of both schools hold that the language of literature embodies a significant aspect of human experience, and represents a creative pattern of verbal structure to impart meaning effectively. Modern Western aesthetic thinking, which includes theories like formalism, new criticism, stylistics, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, discourse analysis, semiotics and dialogic criticism, in one way or another emphasizes the study of the language of literature in order to understand its meaning. Similarly, there is a distinct focus on the language of literature and its meaning in Indian literary theories which include the theory of rasa (aesthetic experience), alaṁkāra (the poetic figure), rīti (diction), dhvani (suggestion), vakrokti (oblique expression) and aucitya (propriety). This book explores how the language of literature and its meaning have been dealt with in both Indian and Western aesthetic thinking. In doing so, the study concentrates on Kuntaka’s theory of vakrokti and Ānandavardhana’s theory of dhvani in Indian aesthetic thinking and Russian formalism and deconstruction in Western thinking. The book categorically focuses on the intersection between the theory of vakrokti and Russian formalism and the meeting-point between the theory of dhvani and deconstruction.

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