Written by a leading scholar who has contributed to English stylistics for over forty years, this book celebrates the close bond between linguistic and literary studies after a period when they hav drifted further apart.

• Explains and illustrates a method of text analysis important for students of language and literature.
• Chapters are built around practical textual analyses of passages of poetry, prose amd drama:- among them works by Dylan Thomas, Keats, Shelley, Hopkins, Woolf, and Shaw.
• Demonstrates the continuity in the methods of stylistics, in spite of revolutionary changes in thinking on both language and literature.
• Shows how new computational techniques are developing.
• Argues that a new balance has to be struck between linguistic analysis and literary interpretation, and between form and function.