Full Description
Over a period of over forty years, Geoffrey Leech has made notable contributions to the field of literary stylistics, using the interplay between linguistic form and literary function as a key to the mystery of how a text comes to be invested with artistic potential.
In this book, seven earlier papers and articles, read previously only by a restricted audience, have been brought together with four new chapters, the whole volume showing a continuity of approach across a period when all too often literary and linguistic studies have appeared to drift further apart.
Leech sets the concept of foregrounding (also known as defamiliarization) at the heart of the interplay between form and interpretation. Through practical and insightful examination of how poems, plays and prose works produce special meaning, he counteracts the flight from the text that has characterized thinking about language and literature in the last thirty years, when the response of the reader, rather than the characteristics and meaning potential of the text itself, have been given undue prominence.
The book provides an enlightening analysis of well-known (as well as less well-known) texts of great writers of the past, including Keats, Shelley, Samuel Johnson, Shaw, Dylan Thomas, and Virginia Woolf.
Contents
PrefaceAcknowledgements 1. Introduction: about this book, its content and its viewpoint 1.1 Stylistics as an 'interdiscipline' 1.2 The chapter-by-chapter progression of this book. 1.3 A digression on 'literariness' 1.4 A list of texts examined Notes 2. Linguistics and the figures of rhetoric 2.1 Introduction 2.2 A linguistic perspective on literary language 2.3 Figures of speech as deviant or foregrounded phenomena in language 2.4 Classifying figures of speech 2.5 Linguistic analysis and critical appreciation Notes 3. 'This Bread I Break' - language and interpretation 3.1 Cohesion in a text 3.2 Foregrounding 3.3 Cohesion of foregrounding 3.4 Implications of context 3.5 Conclusion: interpretation Notes 4. Literary criticism and linguistic description 4.1 The nature of critical statements 4.2 The nature of linguistic statements 4.3 The relation between critical and linguistic statements 4.4 Leavis on Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale' 4.5 Linguistic support for Leavis's account 4.6 Conclusion Notes5. Stylistics 5.1 Introduction 5.2 The text: 'Ode to the West Wind' by Percy B. Shelley 5.3
