Michael Burke, Ed. the Routledge Handbook of Stylistics (2015)

Michael Burke, ed. Routledge Handbook Stylistics. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. viii + 540 pp. In the history the development stylistics, there had never appeared a handbook until the second decade the twenty-first century when moving out young adulthood and into its prime (Burke 7). first half 2014 saw the publication Routledge Handbook (February) and Cambridge Handbook (May; see the following book review). two handbooks, which together form a milestone in the development stylistics, stand in a complementary and reinforcing relation to each other. body Routledge Handbook consists four parts: (I) Historical perspectives in stylistics; (II) Core issues in stylistics; (III) topics in stylistics; and (IV) Emerging and future trends in stylistics. And the body Cambridge Handbook comprises five parts: (I) The discipline stylistics; (II) concepts and stylistics; (III) Techniques style; (IV) The contextual experience style; and (V) Extensions stylistics. In a sense, the content design both handbooks points to the maturity the discipline. picture will become clearer if we trace the content design some representative volumes essays in the stylistic field in the past fifty years or so. In Literary Style: A Symposium (Chatman), published in 1971 when modern was still at an early stage with few approaches, the body the book had been divided mainly according to different aspects style: Theory style, Stylistics and related disciplines, features, Period style, Genre style, and individual authors and texts. Similarly, in Essays in Modern (Freeman), the body design was based on literary genres (Approaches to poetics, Approaches to metrics, Approaches to prose style). In the 1990s, when diversified stylistic flourished, Reader (Weber) divided its eight parts in terms eight distinctive stylistic approaches. first decade the new century saw the publication Contemporary (Lambrou and Stockwell) and Language and Style (McIntyre and Busse). Both divide the parts the body according to the three major literary genres, but instead the vague approaches to, we have the explicit stylistics of prose fiction, poetry, and drama (also dialogue). In fact, the body design Language and Style is modeled after the title the single-authored Exploring the Language Poems, Plays and Prose by Mick Short, to whom the volume is dedicated. As for Contemporary Stylistics, the fact that it still uses literary genres instead stylistic as the basic criterion for division may be accounted for by two factors. First, the volume gives equal weight to and practices, as the book description runs, volume provides a showcase for the range and practices which form modern stylistics: from cognitive poetics to corpus linguistics, from explorations mind-style and spoken discourse in narrative to the workings viewpoint in lyric poetry, from world-meanings to the meanings and emotions literary worlds, and more (Lambrou and Stockwell). Second, one stylistic investigation may have the potential being classified into different according to different criteria. For instance, an essay that uses functional linguistics to investigate the gender politics in narrative fiction can be classified as either functional (linguistic model), or feminist (thematic concern), or narrative (object inquiry). Against this background, the part design the two handbooks, which mark disciplinary maturity, shows a thoughtful, sophisticated, and masterly arrangement the content. division parts in Routledge Handbook foregrounds the relation between the past, the present, and the future stylistics, with an emphasis set on core issues and current topics in the field. …