Literary Style: A Symposium

From the back cover: "Originally presented at the international Symposium on Literary Style at Bellagio, Italy, in August 1969, these essays represent leading schools of thought in America, England, and Continental Europe, and provide a real integration of recent developments in the field. Their main concern in the relationship of linguistics to literary theory and the future of stylistic studies. The papers and the stimulating discussions that follow are both theoretical and closely practical, treating poetry and prose from a wide range of periods, languages, and styles. Together, they constitute an up-to-date summary of an important field of literary study.Modern literary stylistics, drawing upon several disciplines - linguistics, literary criticism, literary history, theory of literature - has in recent years developed methods of analyzing texts and characterizing literary language and forms that are disciplined and replicable, without losing a refreshing diversity. There are the Russian Formalist-Jakobsonians, the French structuralistes, influenced by the Russians, the Czechs, and Hjelmslevian linguistics; the British School, in the tradition of J.R. Firth; the American School, with its debt to the New Criticism and to Bloomfieldian and Chomskian linguistics and more recently to linguistic philosophy; the inheritors of the Continental and particularly the Spitzerian stylistic tradition; and more.The contributors include some of the most eminent literary and linguistic scholars in the world. Among the questions they discuss are: What is style? How do style features emerge? And, is linguistics sufficient to describe literary style, that is, is stylistics merely a branch of linguistics? Also included are convenient summaries of recent developments in the field."