Jeffries’ monograph is genuinely important as it provides a principled and capacious framework for the analysis of poetic discourse. It is both a testament to Jeffries’s long-standing committment to the stylistic analysis of poetry, and to the contribution stylistics can make to linguistic theory. As I write in my review,
The book’s aim is ‘to give readers a systematic and replicable method for considering which features are present in poems they read and to interpret those features in the light of the specific text under scrutiny’ (2022: 4). Such concern with systematicity and replicability informs the expository fabric of the whole work, as well as the stylistic analysis underpinning it. In practice, Jeffries undertakes a multi-feature analysis of 27 contemporary poems – all of which fully reproduced in the appendix (pp. 255-272) to ensure verifiability – and teases out how each feature contributes to the poems’ overall textual meaning and effects. In doing so, Jeffries traces shared strategies and recurring effects, thus reviving the comparative nature of early stylistics.
To access my full review, click here. If you work in stylistics and discourse analysis (because poetic discourse is a kind of discourse!), this is a must-have, which has inspired me in ways that, hopefully, will become apparent in the not too far future.
I am happy to share that my new research article, titled “Principles of … stylistics: The central place of IA Richards’ principles of literary criticism in a theory of stylistics” has just been published online and is open access in Language and Literature, a leading journal of stylistics. The article is part of a special issue (edited by David West) aimed at assessing the significance of I. A. Richards‘ 1924 masterpiece of aesthetics and criticism in the context of contemporary stylistics.
In my theoretical paper I examine at length Richards’ ambivalent attitude towards imagery, the troubled route between stimulus and response, the tension between the richness of literary experience and the reductionist requirements of experimental research, and the stratification and location of literary effects. In short, I attempt to show how I. A. Richards, a century later, can still help us make stylistics better. Indeed, in this article I make some proposals that will definitely inform much of my future scholarly work, so it is a sort of preview of such work as well as an evaluation of the work already done (by others and by myself).
Click here to access the full article and… happy reading!
