1 Introduction Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley

Stylistics is the proper study of literature. We mean this in several senses. Firstly, it is fit and apt. It is special and specialised. It is delineated by rules and principles, and by reasonable, open and honest argument. And for the evaluative sense of ‘proper’, we also do mean to suggest that it is ethically superior to other, non-stylistic forms of literary study. We insist that any approach to literary study that does not engage closely with the language in which the literary work appears is by definition indirect, distracted, partial and improper. The word stylistics carries a strong sense of its recent etymology, inheriting a detailed interest in style from its French stylistique and German Stilistik ancestors in the 1950s and 1960s. Stylistics in the English language emerged as a British–American field in the late 1960s, and then developed with a northern European and Australian focus throughout the succeeding decades. There has been a steady broadening of the domain encompassed by the notion of ‘style’ throughout this period. Initially, stylistic features of a text were restricted to the narrow linguistic elements at the levels of phonetic arrangement, metrics and prosody, morphology and lexical choice, semantics and syntax up to the level of the clause and sentence. Even a restriction of a literary discussion to these features has never made such a discussion formalist, to the extent of disregarding matters of performance, utterance, artistic design and aesthetic effect. However, it was easy for others to disparage stylistics on this basis as having a narrow, decontextualised purview. Those working in early stylistics regarded themselves very strongly as part of a European tradition of textual commentary and theory. Continuities and common concerns were perceived with the Russian Obshchestvo Izucheniia Poeticheskogo Yazyka (the Society for the Study of Poetic Language; the so-called ‘Formalists’), with the Prague School and the French Structuralists, and with the New Critics in the USA. For monoglot English-speakers, the influence of the polemical