The year’s work in stylistics 2023 & 2024

Abstract

1. Introduction: Stylistics in and of the world

Before starting the review proper, an explanatory note is needed. The customary Year’s Work in Stylistics has experienced a series of delays largely owing to the lingering impact of the pandemic. Thus, in addition to providing a comprehensive overview of the research on stylistics published in 2024, this review also incorporates a selection of books from the year 2023.

In 2023, Hazel Price closed her Year’s Work in Stylistics 2022 with a nod to the ways that stylistics is being used across the world. That gesture has proven felicitous, not just across but in and of the world, as is now manifest in the research published under the scope of stylistics. Over the past 2 years, scholarship in stylistics has been marked by its adaptability and a conscious effort to reflect on the discipline’s role in and outside academia. This is evident in the growing number of academic undertakings embracing transformative and expansive changes. While still at its heart, long-gone are the days in which stylistics’ main playing field concerned literary texts. Informed by fields such as sociology, cognitive science, pragmatics, multimodality and ecology, among many others, stylistics has expanded both vertically and horizontally. Vertically, it has revisited and broadened existing theories, as seen in Giovanelli and Harrison’s (2024) second edition of Cognitive Grammar in Stylistics and in the recent additions to Burke’s (2023) Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. Horizontally, as demonstrated by the scholarship surveyed here, stylistics actively fosters and promotes collaboration between disciplines. The explosion and cross-pollination of the field have also taken stylistics to engage with an ever-expanding number of text types, which should be understood in their broadest and most inclusive sense.

As a discipline that investigates the crossroads at which language and style converge, stylistics continues to assert its significance in addressing contemporary global issues without leaving behind more traditional or classic texts. This is reflected in the themes of the PALA 2023 and 2024 conferences: Exploring connections between stylistics and the environment and Stylistics in the world, respectively, as well as in the stylistic research published in these past 2 years. As is usually the case with the Year’s Work articles, the discussion that follows is organized into sections grouping publications with similar interests. However, my classification should be regarded as heuristic; the divisions in this article simply provide a roadmap to navigate through all the published material in a more operative way. In fact, many of the publications discussed step in and operate at the intersections of various research areas simultaneously to produce innovative, cutting-edge scholarship.

2. Publications in 2023

It is, then, only fair to open this review with the research published in 2023 first. Perhaps amongst the most central publications of 2023 is Burke’s (2023) 2nd edition of the Routledge Handbook of Stylistics (the 1st edition was published almost 10 years ago). Like its predecessor, this compendium is designed to introduce the core principles and practices of stylistic analysis (Burke, 2023: 8) but this edition expands meaningfully to reflect current trends in the field. Burke (2023) states that the newer contributions may come to define stylistics in the next decade and, although some chapters from the first edition, such as those on hypertext fiction and comics, have been omitted in the second, several new ones have made an appearance. For instance, Harrison (2023) charts the recent substantial progress of cognitive stylistics, described by Burke as having made ‘huge inroads’ (Burke, 2023: 6) into the field. Also new to this edition are the last three chapters in the volume. Canning (2023) draws on a number of case studies to explicate the essentials of forensic stylistics. Giovanelli (2023) turns to children’s literature and Price (2023) adopts a corpus stylistic approach to study mental health. Together with Burke (2023), both Hamawand (2023) and Lugea and Walker (2023) also offer accessible, in-depth guides to stylistics tailored to students and early-career researchers. Each clarifies some of the discipline’s foundational concepts, such as mind style, point of view or deixis while providing activities, study questions and further reading to consolidate and expand on learning. Though both draw on cognitive theory, Lugea and Walker (2023) also incorporate corpus methods and digital tools, whereas Hamawand (2023) includes a historical overview of the discipline and of major areas of inquiry. Particularly interesting are the sections in Lugea and Walker (2023) that walk readers through the application of cognitive and corpus frameworks. In a similar fashion to Giovanelli and Harrison (2024) below, Lugea and Walker (2023) also include a section on research design, a very welcome addition especially for students and newcomers navigating the early stages of their academic journey.

In line with this cognitive trend, Brannon’s (2023) ambitious Language, Cognition and Emotion in Keats’ Poetry analyzes the poet’s style and claims that his poetry uniquely integrates linguistic form with cognitive-emotional processes. Based on Langacker’s cognitive grammar model, Brannon does an exceptional job at showing how grammar elements (e.g., aspect, modality and prepositions) and metaphor create emotional effects, showing the tight-knit relations between these elements in the poet’s style. For instance, in her analysis of ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ Brannon mentions how expressions such as ‘my heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense’ indicate a metonymic mapping where physical sensations stand in for emotional states. She interprets this as an instance of change in heart rate for emotion and associates it with the broader metonymy body is a container for the emotions. Though Brannon’s analysis effectively delineates how Keats’s language may invite a particular cognitive-emotional reading, it rests on assumed cognitive responses rather than reader-based empirical validation. The absence of reader-response data leaves questions about how universally these effects are experienced unanswered. Nonetheless, it is always refreshing to encounter works that unabashedly and directly engage with the texture of poetic language beyond literary criticism.

Highlighted in the Year’s Work 2022 as a key publication, Gibbons and King’s (2023) Reading the Contemporary Author: Narrative, Authority, Fictionality revisits the enduring question of authorship, a critical concept for literary criticism, narratology and stylistics. This edited collection examines how authorship is constructed and interrogated in modern narratives across various fiction and non-fiction texts. For instance, González (2023) makes the case for how the publishing and award industries reinforce systemic barriers that marginalize certain communities. Through his analysis of Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt, González (2023) argues that some narratives are only deemed legitimate when told by privileged authors, thereby restricting representation. Both editors contribute chapters dealing with the topic of death. Gibbons (2023) connects the strands of autobiographies, elegies and multimodal literature to consider how readers experience literary elegy. King (2023), by contrast, explores how contemporary novels depict ailing and dying author-characters as a means to reflect on the waning authority of the author figure and the perceived decline of the novel. However, I found it surprising that despite an introductory emphasis on ‘the digital revolution’ and the ‘new challenges and new opportunities’ (2023: xiii) it enables, many of the chapters that follow fail to analyze such challenges and opportunities in depth and, for the most part, limit their focus to traditional written literary forms, such as autobiographies, elegies and fiction among others. Also notable in 2023 is Noletto et al. (2023), a collection that repositions the design, interpretation and effects of fictional language from the periphery to the center of stylistic inquiry. The chapters in this collection argue that fictional languages are capable of performing various functions, such as narrative immersion, characterization and world-building. Particularly interesting in this respect is Mooshamer et al. (2023) who bring empirical weight to claims about sound symbolism.

3. Pop culture

Pop culture is one area that seems to illustrate well many of the issues I raise above. For much of its history, academia has generally privileged the study of ‘literary’, ‘high-brow’ or ‘serious’ texts, whereas pop culture has often been relegated to the periphery and sometimes dismissed as ephemeral, commercially-driven or aesthetically inferior. However, in recent years, there has been a discernible move which reflects a broader recognition of the cultural and intellectual significance of pop culture texts, as noted by Montoro and Werner (2024). This emergent trend is not merely a reconsideration of subject matter but a methodological expansion, challenging traditional hierarchies and demonstrating that the stylistic mechanisms underpinning literary excellence are equally operative in television, film, music, (video)games, digital narratives and other cultural forms. In examining how meaning is generated, manipulated and received within these diverse forms, contemporary stylistic research not only legitimizes pop culture as a worthy object of study but also enriches our understanding of meaning-making in the twenty-first century.

Thus, 2024 has witnessed a wave of publications engaging with a range of pop culture texts. For instance, the special issue ‘Interdisciplinary approaches to the language of pop culture’ in the journal English Text Construction or the launch of the new Journal of Language and Pop Culture. In the former, Montoro and Zaganor (2024) investigate humor in chick lit, a genre marked by its humorous and conversational style. Montoro and Zaganor (2024) apply corpus-based and qualitative methods to analyze how ‘humor phenomena are linguistically realized’ (2024: 214). Though there is still much work to be done in assessing humor, this study provides much needed empirical, corpus-based evidence to account for some linguistic issues that previously had only been addressed anecdotally. Walshe (2024), in turn, focuses on comic strips and caricatures as it would be ‘a mistake to dismiss the impact that early caricatures, comic strips and other disposable pop culture products had on American society’ (Walshe, 2024: 240). This article examines the diachronic representation of Irish speech in a corpus of 200 comics from 1943 to 2021. The study’s results suggest that an ‘Irish character’ has become encoded in US comic books. Finally, one article that considers genre-specific issues is Schubert (2024). Schubert convincingly demonstrates how the language used by the movie industry toys with Grice’s conversational maxims to profile villains in thriller movies, similarly to the way stylistics has long demonstrated the effect of implicatures in character construction. This type of ‘pragmatic deviation […] not only contributes to the characterization of individuals but also to the appealing discursive effect of suspense’ (Schubert, 2024: 120). Schubert’s findings contribute to a growing body of stylistic research that examines how linguistic manipulation interacts with narrative expectations and audience engagement. His study also raises interesting questions about whether similar strategies are employed across different genres, such as crime dramas or psychological thrillers, where ambiguity and deception play are crucial.

Werner and Ledermann (2024) also combine quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the notion of authenticity in American country music, as typically associated with Southern-American English (SAE). Analyzing ‘a set of morphosyntactic SAE features’ (Werner and Ledermann, 2024: 15), they argue that, while morphosyntactic features cannot reliably index authenticity, SAE accent features remain crucial for cultural authenticity. Another piece of research that combines quantitative and qualitative methods in the first issue of Language and Literature¹ (2024) is Castro (2024). Castro’s article investigates the syntactic and semantic make-up of a corpus of 15 US fantasy TV series. He concludes that both the medium of television and the fantasy genre play a part in the language of these fantasy TV series as proven by a strong focus on geography and spatial deixis and that tensions between medium and genre help account for some of the findings regarding realism and (in)formality. Bartley and Piergiorgio (2024) also engage with TV series, though they turn to true crime in a Netflix documentary portraying the ‘Central Park Jogger Case’. They analyze transitivity and appraisal patterns and report that ‘language choices adopted by figures of authority […] may have contributed to a presupposition of guilt’ (Bartley and Piergiorgio, 2024: 13). The article successfully demonstrates how integrating both transitivity and appraisal analyses can provide a fine-grained understanding of how language can impact narratives of guilt and innocence.

A further article that illustrates how pop culture and, more specifically, TV series problematize non-fictional issues is Bednarek and Meek (2024), who assert that linguistic differences in scripted fictional media can ‘enfigure, typify or stereotype the image before the hearing viewer’ (Bednarek and Meek, 2024: 2). They investigate how Indigenous creatives in Australian television counter dominant discourses through linguistic and semiotic strategies by drawing on established concepts in sociolinguistics, for example, indexicality, rhematization and erasure. On the back of their analysis, the authors put forward the notions of semiotic overlay, ‘which creates new, unexpected combinations’ and erasure marking, ‘which calls out dominant tropes and stereotypes’ (2024: 4). Using Bednarek’s (2023) corpus of Indigenous-authored Australian television series, the study shows how strategic language use serves to reflect on the diverse Indigenous identities and as a tool to challenge hegemonic linguistic norms. Whitney et al. (2024) also explores how contemporary Indigenous TV series challenge historically-reinforced racist stereotypes. Using the concept of semiotic overlay mentioned above, the authors argue that these series add new layers of meaning to fictionalized land acknowledgments, complicating their conventional interpretation. Despite the fact that semiotic overlay is strategically used to critique the genre of land acknowledgements, the argument seems potentially overgeneralized. When the authors draw attention to ‘who is acknowledged and for what purpose’ (Whitney et al., 2024: 12), it echoes transitivity too strongly to ignore what insights might be gained from such an approach. From TV series to films, Seracini (2024) identifies what American values are encoded and transmitted in metaphors in a corpus of 50 films produced in the US. Combining again quantitative and qualitative methods, she concludes that ‘benevolence and self-direction are the most frequently mentioned values in the corpus’ (Seracini, 2024: 86). Although the film corpus contains films from different genres, Seracini does not mention whether the metaphors vary across genres.

Finally, Noletto’s (2024) Fictional Languages in Science Fiction Literature addresses a long-standing lacuna with regard to the role of invented languages in science fiction beyond aesthetic embellishment. This book culminates his previous work on fictional languages (Noletto et al., 2023) already discussed above. Employing a multidisciplinary approach, Noletto integrates stylistics, multimodality, narrative theory, pragmatics and semiotics to develop a model to analyze glossopoesis systematically. Rather than treating invented languages as decoration, Noletto (2024) repositions them as stylistic devices with various functions that actively influence science fiction narratives. His taxonomy, encompassing speculative, rhetorical, descriptive, diegetic and paratextual functions, provides an exhaustive framework that abandons traditional and somewhat stale discussions of linguistic realism and displays the potential of these resources. The ample selection of case studies is one of the key strengths of the book; however, its heavy emphasis on English texts might limit its theoretical reach and applicability, as Western science fiction conventions may differ from others traditions.

4. Pragmatics and multimodality

The intersection of pragmatics and stylistics continues to offer a fertile ground for examining meaning-making in literary and non-literary texts, particularly in the ways in which context, interaction and communicative intent guide interpretation. This year’s contributions to pragma-stylistics reflect both ongoing theoretical advancements and methodological refinements, with a focus on historical discourse analysis, multimodal communication and the role of politeness strategies in literary characterization. A significant contribution, Sorlin and Virtanen’s edited collection, ‘engages with hypocrisy for the first time’ (2024: 2), mapping the phenomenon onto established pragmatic concepts such as face, flattery and politeness. The book is an ambitious attempt at systematizing the study of hypocrisy as a linguistic phenomenon. Particularly, the second chapter proposes an innovative typology to categorize hypocrisy along a continuum from manipulative deception to socially constructive behavior. Other contributors skillfully demonstrate the interaction between pragmatics and hypocrisy across a large number of contexts: face-to-face (Haugh, 2024), online discourse (Tanskanen, 2024), fiction (Gillings, 2024) and prepared speeches (Halmari, 2024), to name a few. Readers familiar with previous work on (im)politeness might recognize the common ground shared between hypocrisy and other more commonly studied politeness frameworks. If hypocrisy operates within pragmatic frameworks similar to that of politeness, then stylistic analysis can extend facework theories beyond conventional politeness strategies to examine how hypocrisy, realized as deliberate linguistic contradictions, evasions or double standards, contributes to meaning-making in texts. This broader engagement with pragmatics and meaning-making (particularly in digital discourse) resonates with Benammar’s (2024) recent article on expressive strategies in X (formerly Twitter). This article is concerned with how certain textual choices influence user responses. In particular, she contributes to the growing field of digital stylistics, showing how hyperbole functions as an expressive tool in online communication and as indexical of certain communities, for example, stan communities. Though the article demonstrates the connection between certain pragmatic markers and emphasis, affect and identity signaling, the findings are presented anecdotally and key quantitative details are left underdeveloped, obscuring the data significantly.

Another publication framed within the pragmatics tradition is Sorlin (2024b); she offers a thought-provoking account of how the novel Citizen. An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine enacts racism through pragmatic positioning and inferential work, whereby the reader is placed at the center of a journey of discovery ‘to elicit reflection’ (Sorlin 2024b: 942). This work builds on Sorlin’s previous research on the pronoun you and expands her findings to demonstrate how you functions here as a racially-charged resource for identification and distancing. Sorlin (2024a) further investigates the pragmatic behavior of the pronouns you and one in Orwell’s fiction. She analyzes shifts between their (in)definite and specific-generic referents to highlight their capacity for both egocentric and indefinite reference. Thus, by expanding her previous work on the pronoun you, she demonstrates the adaptability, scope and power of her model. A key-strength of the chapter is its corpus-based approach, which allows Sorlin to systematically tag and analyze pronoun usage. Despite this, her work remains qualitative, without an empirical or statistical focus which could reinforce her findings. Finally, Kizelbach (2024) presents a well-structured analysis of how linguistic (in)competence reflects political failure in Shakespeare’s Henry VI. This article builds on her previous work on the notion of ‘face’ to underscore the importance of pragmatics to understand dramatic characterization. Her argument is strongest when demonstrating how impoliteness functions in this play as a strategy for maintaining authority, which adds to broader themes in Shakespeare research such as leadership, deception and public performance.

The research carried out in recent decades on metaphors has moved from purely textual analysis to accommodate new directions in visual and multimodal trends. This year has been especially prolific for Charles Forceville, who has reviewed recent methods for the identification and interpretation of multimodal metaphors. See for instance, Forceville’s (2024a) account of multimodal metaphors in films, which relies on his longstanding work in multimodal metaphor theory. Here, he challenges the FILMIP’s (Bort-Mir, 2019) method for identification of metaphors by arguing that visual and multimodal metaphors require analytical instruments distinct from those used in verbal metaphor identification. In short, he contends that the visual resists simple transcription and demands its own grammar. Forceville (2024b) examines how political cartoons use visual metaphors to convey complex ideas. He uses his own research largely based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) as the foundation to identify and interpret visual metaphors. Additionally, he critiques VISMIP (Šorm and Steen, 2018), arguing it often overlooks context-dependent cues required for such study. Forceville (2024b) emphasizes two main concerns: the need for robust criteria when analyzing large sets of cartoons by pointing out that metaphors exist on different levels of abstraction, as well as the need to clearly define which traits are mapped onto the source domain. Finally, although there has been some research on verbal metaphors in the case of cancer patients communication, Gebraad and Forceville (2024) bring CMT into the domain of medical animation films to study discourse on cancer. The article underscores both the importance of multimodal literacy and tools to analyze multimodal elements in contemporary research. Their findings reinforce the dominance of the battle and journey metaphors but they do not critically interrogate why alternative metaphors fail to emerge or whether the medium of animation constraints metaphorical choice. What seems increasingly clear in this area of multimodal metaphor research is that future work might benefit from moving beyond identification and toward testing, something that could potentially transform this area from primarily descriptive analysis to a more applied form of stylistics with tangible implications. It is perhaps in this direction that stylistics may find one of its next horizons, not merely to catalogue such expressive forms, but as a tool for inquiry with real-world consequences, poised to even intervene in the metaphors that root in public thought.

5. Cognitive stylistics

Cognitive stylistics has seen a highly productive year in terms of publications which attest to its intellectual maturity and expansion. The field continues to evolve through its dialogue with adjacent disciplines, most prominently cognitive sciences such as cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics. The works reviewed in this section examine various of these aspects and reflect ongoing developments in areas such as mind-modelling, conceptual metaphor, immersion and the cognitive mechanisms behind individual engagement with narrative and discourse. Ultimately, cognitive stylistics aims to capture the full complexity of the literary experience by exploring how readers process, interpret and respond to texts.

One 2024 publication that shows the resilience and work ethics of the stylistics community is Boucher et al.’s (2024) Reading Habits in the COVID-19 Pandemic. The work that originated during the rough times of the pandemic, the Lockdown Library Project, has now culminated in the publication of this book as proof of academic achievement and as a cultural document. Each chapter offers a self-contained analysis of one aspect related to the experience of reading, for example, which genres were preferred or abandoned during this period or how did the lockdown affect reading time. The authors command and combine a multitude of linguistic methods to provide a comprehensive account of the role played by literature back then, fostering resilience and social connection during an unprecedented period of isolation. More importantly, the evidence offers timely insights for policymakers and educators interested in promoting reading as a means of emotional and cognitive well-being, thus reaffirming one of literature’s role in public life. Another important publication is Giovanelli and Harrison’s (2024) Cognitive Grammar in Stylistics, an accessible and comprehensive pedagogical guide to the application of cognitive grammar in literary studies. This 2nd edition has been updated with additional activities, examples and references and a new chapter to guide students’ projects. Although the focus is on students working on projects related to cognitive grammar, many will benefit from advice on how to structure oral presentations and organize their own work —competences that are relevant across a range of contexts. As a teaching companion and an entry point into cognitive stylistics, Giovanelli and Harrison (2024) offers clarity and structure to students and new researchers in the field.

A particularly compelling contribution comes from Lugea et al. (2024), whose study builds on the broader project on dementia fiction (Lugea in Volume 31 of this journal; Carney et al., 2023). Addressing the perennial question of whether fiction (specifically narratives featuring characters with dementia) can convey truth, the study adopts a methodologically rich approach to their data. By combining the insights from a large corpus of contemporary dementia fiction with qualitative data from reading groups, the research exhibits stylistics operating effectively within an interdisciplinary framework. The findings make a persuasive case for fiction as a medium capable of simulating dimensions of real-life experience. Notably, the study reveals that disagreement among some readers regarding certain evaluative statements ‘shows that lived experience strongly conditions readers’ evaluations of accuracy and authenticity’ (Lugea et al., 2024: 7). Moreover, the analysis underscores that there is some degree of epistemological truth in fiction and that readers form their impressions by combining top-down and bottom-up cognitive processes.

On the pages on this journal, Pager-McClymont (2024) builds on her previous work in pathetic fallacy and offers a methodologically-robust expansion that now includes what she terms ‘the converse pathetic fallacy (CoPF)’. Her identification method ensures that CoPF is not merely an interpretive phenomenon but a structured element with clear textual markers. Despite pathetic fallacy having been explored in the existing literature widely, Pager-McClymont makes a substantial contribution to stylistics by expanding the analytical reach into visual and multimodal modes, reinforcing the necessity of cross-disciplinary approaches in contemporary stylistic research. Interestingly, the article claims that ‘the overall effect CoPF has on readerly experience is that it can build characters and ambience, as well as generate humor’ (2024: 66), thus, paving the way for future research in this regard. Here in particular, when discussing the film Addams Family Values, Pager-McClymont shows that the opposing or contrasting the emotions the characters feel and their surroundings in CoPF, especially when they defy typical expectations, can have comedic effects. Also in this journal, Whitt (2024) effectively demonstrates how Le Guin operationalizes estrangement in science fiction to disrupt/preserve readers’ schemata and present a radically distinct society in The Dispossessed. The article fills a lacuna in science fiction research by complementing the little work done on the linguistic realizations of estrangement. Whitt pinpoints how the invented language of the society in the novel, its translation to Anglicized neologisms and metalinguistic commentary contribute to building estrangement in the context of an anarchical society. Moreover, the article states some of the inherent limitations of schema theory by acknowledging that ‘a reader from a notably different background […] may well read the novel differently and a number of different schema disruptions may or may not occur’ (2024: 125).

Another article concerned with the effects of a work of fiction on readers is Haines (2024), in which she ‘explores the perception of comic timing effects in prose fiction’ and how these effects impact ‘a reader’s ability to recognize and appreciate humor’ (2024: 93). Interestingly, the notion of comic timing in performed humor that Haines describes resembles that of style: both phenomena seem straightforward at first glance but, upon closer examination, are revealed to be elusive, unintuitive and resistant to simple definitions. However, Haines presents a rigorous and theoretically innovative study that integrates cognitive grammar, text world theory and a humor-processing model to provide a grounded explanation of humor perception and how it emerges in fiction. Certain limitations actually suggest productive directions for future research where studies using eye-tracking methods may assess whether textual pacing consistently influences humor appreciation. A comparative discussion of comic timing across different media may enrich the model proposed here further. Similarly interested in how stylistic choices influence engagement, Bourdeau (2024) explores transmission as failure in Donald Ryan’s The Spinning Heart. She argues that Ryan’s style draws on ‘readers’ reflexes to co-construct the narrative […] and the effects this has on the interpretation of the novel’ (Bourdeau, 2024: 2) because transmission in the novel is, for the most part, a failure. She distinguishes two types of failure or obstructions: diegetically and between text and reader. Her study is particularly compelling in its integration of narrative theory, cognitive stylistics and discourse analysis, which goes on to show how polyphonic narration and unreliable perspectives can complicate readers’ meaning-making processes.

The volume spawning from the PALA 2022 conference, Style and Sense(s) puts forward a rich, interdisciplinary exploration of sensory experience in stylistics. To start with, Pillière and Sorlin (2024) challenge the dominance of sight in today’s research paradigm arguing that tactile and olfactory perception also play crucial roles in meaning-making. They argue that metaphors such as understanding is grasping are equally used in our attempt to comprehend ideas or the world around us (Pillière and Sorlin, 2024: 3). The notion that sight is the dominant mode in literary narration is further elaborated on by Toolan (2024), who also reports that the ‘lesser senses […] are also the more intimate or deictically proximal’ (2024: 69). Emmott and Alexander’s (2024) discussion of sensory manipulation in Sherlock Holmes show how perception is stylistically encoded across genres. Several chapters also extend stylistics beyond language and engage with visual art (Gavin, 2024a), oral poetry performance (Van Peer and Chesnokova, 2024) and embodied cognition (Adami, 2024). Overall, the book significantly contributes to the evolution of stylistics, demonstrating how style is not merely verbal but an embodied experience. In line with this research, Belligon, 2024a explores sound as the narrator’s primary mode of perception in Nutshell, where the unborn protagonist lacks access to sight, foregrounding auditory cues as a means of constructing reality by claiming that ‘sounds in the novel are connected with events, not with things’ (Belligon, 2024a: 2). While this analysis could have provided an opportunity to examine senses beyond sight and sound (as she indeed does in Belligon (2024b)) it corroborates Toolan’s (2024) observation that sound remains the second most prominent sensory modality after sight.

Finally, Romano’s (2024) Metaphor in Socio-Political Contexts is a stimulating edited volume that draws on CMT and applies it to non-fictional discourse. The three sections of the book explore the role of metaphors as cognitive and discursive tools in different contexts and languages. Section one focuses on how metaphors participate in digital media discourse. Filardo-Llamas and Roldán-García (2024) investigate the social network Tumblr to study how users express their identities and challenge traditional gender binaries by means of metonymic, metaphoric and cultural frames, the latter understood as ‘a particular type of creative process which depends on the activation of cultural knowledge shared by the discourse participants’ (2024: 71). Peterssen and Soares da Silva (2024) explore polarizing metaphors in Spanish and Brazilian far-right populist leaders’ Twitter (now X) accounts. Their methodology combines corpus linguistics, critical discourse and CMT to detect differences in metaphor types based on political contexts. The chapters in section two examine how metaphor blends with conspiracy theories to intensify radical narratives, how alternative metaphors on social media contest dominant views on social issues and how metaphor functions in blame discourse, especially which metaphors persist and when they gain traction. In short, the strengths of the volume lie in its interdisciplinary approach and empirical focus, though some chapters could have incorporated quantitative validation to make their findings more robust.

6. Narrative and poetry

In 2024, stylistic development with regard to narrative concerns has been marked by renewed attention to how the effects of seemingly small language choices affect narrative voice, perspective and reader interpretation. The volume of work produced in this area has been considerable but, due to space constraints, I am unfortunately unable to fully account for it all.

For instance, stylistic inquiry into narrative has focused on the exploration and effects that certain pronominal forms bring about. Much of the recent attention has been focused on you. Wong (2024) is one such article that explores how shifts from I-narration to You-narration are a sign of the protagonist’s loss of selfhood in Dangarembga’s Tambudzai trilogy. The change occurs gradually from novel to novel, as the protagonist leaves her natal Rhodesia (currently Zimbabwe) to attend school in Great Britain. The narrator (and protagonist) feels more detached from her culture over time which, according to Wong (2024: 102), is emphasized by ‘the narrator’s obstinate refusal to emerge as an ‘I’ at the level of discourse’. The article contributes to the discourse on You-narration in postcolonial fiction and notes how narrative voice can articulate racialized trauma and psychic disintegration. Sorlin, 2024c shares significant thematic and stylistic concerns with those in Wong (2024). Sorlin, 2024c: 12) also notes how the second person narration reflects psychic turmoil given the ‘impossibility for the character to have her own voice’ and the ambiguous role of the speaker/addressee, a sort of ‘voice-over’ narrator. Sorlin, 2024c departs from a simple yet illuminating analysis of the types of processes in which you is used in Adichie’s ‘Tomorrow’s too far’ to prove that processes of sensing are merely a (bodily) register of what the protagonist sees, hears or thinks but there is no interiorization. To put it in Sorlin’s words, ‘transmission is never direct’. Both articles reveal the mechanisms in which literature can operationalize the traumatic conditions of selfhood and the politics of one’s voice. The you voice, with its ambivalence, its accusatory and empathic potential as well as its ability to mediate shame, trauma and memory, is now the site of some of the field’s most innovative and politically resonant work. Sorlin (2024d) focuses once more on the second person pronoun across different genres and authors with the aim to analyze how each writer uses you to position the reader differently. However, this paper stands apart from the previous two in its sensorial and performative, even rhythmic approach. Sorlin’s (2024d) framing of you as a ‘chameleon-like’ pronoun and her metaphor of narrative as dance offer a more optimistic, participatory model of reading. Perhaps, researchers interested in the creation of empathy through literary texts could consider the second person pronoun, which Sorlin argues is ‘an immensely powerful vector of empathy’ (2024d: 16).

While Ikeo et al. (2024) also touch on pronominal forms and narrative voice, their primary focus lies in the exploration of narrative tense, particularly in the structure and effects of present-tense narration in contemporary fiction. A Corpus Stylistics Approach to Contemporary Present-Tense Narrative explores how tense choice affects narrative experience. Ikeo et al. (2024) offer a data-driven reappraisal of present-tense narration, challenging the assumption that narrative is inherently tied to the past tense. Using annotated corpora for present- and past-tense fiction, they compare narration, speech, writing and thought presentation. The book also demonstrates the increasing use of progressive aspect in present-tense fiction in a way reminiscent of oral storytelling. Perhaps future research might shed light on the discourse level at which present-tense narrative is actually becoming more ‘oral’. Other findings in their work reveal that present-tense fiction uses more pronouns, phrasal verbs and finite verbs as well as fewer adjectives and proper nouns, all evidence of colloquialization. Though focused on English-language fiction from 2000 to 2016, the study makes a strong case for recognizing present-tense narration as stylistically distinct. The characteristics of speech and thought presentations are revisited in this journal by Ikeo and Miura (2004). Whereas the findings in Semino and Short’s original taxonomy clearly indicate that internal narration is the preferred form to present thought, Ikeo and Miura conclude that thought presentation in the 21th century is much more variable, perhaps owing to the veering from past to present as the dominant narrative tense. Another article focused on narratorial concerns is Nakao (2024), which challenges the view that obtrusive, authoritative narrators avoid portraying characters’ thoughts. In investigating Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Nakao concludes that authorial narration is not inherently opposed to interior complexity and that this type of narrator successfully manipulates Free Indirect Thought to conceal its presence and create ambiguity, empathy and/or irony.

Another substantial contribution to stylistics is Harrison (2024), a methodologically rich study that exemplifies cognitive stylistics at its best. Throughout the monograph, Harrison argues that Atwood’s linguistic choices profoundly influence reader interpretation, using cognitive frameworks such as metaphor theory, reconstrual and Text World Theory to illuminate the complexities in Atwood’s writing. Harrison argues that Atwood’s style creates narrative ambiguity by inviting multiple interpretations. Harrison draws on the concept of ‘construal’ from cognitive grammar to analyze Atwood’s portrayal of characters whose identities are unstable, fragmented and difficult to pin down, describing them as ‘inherently multiplied and fundamentally elusive’ (Harrison, 2024: 78). Moreover, Harrison expands the boundaries of the study by incorporating multimodal insights through the adaptation of one of the novels into a television series. Multimodal elements such as composition and shot type reinforce cognitive phenomena such as psychological fragmentation and split identity, most evident where ‘in the voiceovers […] the narrating June/Offred we hear is contrasted with the silent June/Offred we see’ (Harrison, 2024: 193). A more historical but equally revelatory study is Bray (2024), which examines late 17^th and early 18^th century correspondence manuals as stylistic and narrative precursors to the epistolary novel. Bray (2024) argues that manuals like The Secretary’s Guide (1705) and The Young Secretary’s Guide (1687) employ practices such as quotation, anticipation of address and manipulation of deictic markers that would become reflected in later epistolary novels. Notably, Bray also shows that even model letters reflect polyvocal layering and cites one in which a woman revoices her previous claims. This ‘intermingling of perspectives’ (2024: 16) foreshadows free indirect discourse. In a formalist turn that anchors this year’s work in verse, Quick’s article (2024), in the pages of this journal, applies Optimality Theory (originally proposed for phonetics) to medial Welsh poetry. Quick (2024) notes that syntactic anomalies in the cywydd, such as adjective-noun inversions and preverbal particle omissions, are not arbitrary or purely stylistic, but governed by ranked, violable constraints that privilege metrical felicity over syntactic regularity.

7. Discourse stylistics

Stylistics was traditionally defined as the study of style in literary texts. However, as demonstrated by the growing body of research above, this straightforward enough definition has exponentially accommodated case studies other than literary texts. Besides studying texts beyond the literary scope, the malleability of this discipline also has enabled the adoption and adaption of related approaches. Particularly, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has been extensively employed by stylisticians concerned with the social dimension.

For instance, Adam (2024) explores the notion of the metaperspective, drawn from psychology, which she defines as the view we speculate others have of us. Innovatively, Adam (2024: 83) proposes a ‘racialised metaperspective’, a sub-type particularly concerned with color, culture and/or ethnicity. Using one character’s status as homodiegetic narrator and the frequency with which they refer to the racialized metaperspective, Adam argues it creates a distinctive mind style. Though the article would require further research to broaden the applicability of the concept across other texts and contexts, Adam successfully identifies key linguistic resources in the construction of the racialized metaperspective, that is, evaluative lexis, a semantic field of color, culture and/or ethnicity and dialect (re)presentation. The construction of the racialized metaperspective is not only a mechanism for characterization but also denounces the racially-motivated inequity that Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings points to. In this journal, Dahllöf (2024) sets out to investigate Swedish fiction to (dis)prove the assumption that men and women write genre fiction differently. To this purpose, Dahllöf (2024) compiles two large corpora of male- and female-authored Swedish fiction. This article is a methodologically sophisticated and empirically rigorous contribution to (corpus) stylistics, gender studies and computational literary analysis. The author notes how some of the differences might be amplified in bestsellers due to commercial or marketing pressures; hence, a comparison with non-bestselling contemporary Swedish fiction might prove useful to test whether market forces really shape gendered writing trends.

Mathe (2024), like Bednarek and Meek (2024) and Whitney et al. (2024) above, also investigates issues of Indigenous language but turns his attention to peripheral news outlets in Africa. The article investigates what stylistic strategies are used on these platforms on the basis of content analysis and interviews. Despite the article over-emphasis on its ‘stylistic analytical methods’ (Mathe, 2024: 99), many findings are merely descriptive, presenting examples and paraphrased interview comments without really relating them to theoretical concepts in stylistics or other analytical categories. Nevertheless, there is merit in its expansion of the geographical and sociolinguistic scope of discourse-stylistics to include Indigenous language journalism. Ras and Koning (2024) also explore a non-English context and rely on the long-standing association between stylistics and Faircloughian CDA with a focus on transitivity analysis. The article investigates how Dutch parliamentarians have discussed —or increasingly not discussed— the role of poverty in sexual exploitation of children in tourism. The sizeable dataset of 427 documents spanning 25 years provides a robust case study to inform policymaking, effectively bridging the practical gap between critical stylistics and social practice. The main findings highlight the discursive shift from structural to individualized framings, in accordance with broader neoliberal political changes and the progressive de-emphasis of poverty as a cause or context by the Dutch parliamentary discourse. Huang (2024) (in this journal) in a rich interdisciplinary article, integrates stylistics, corpus linguistics and social psychology to examine a corpus of online reviews of a medical memoir. Using LIWC, the paper concludes by mapping affective and social processes onto lexical items, which actively shape narrative modulations in online user reviews.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Religion, by Pihlaja and Ringrow (2024), is a comprehensive exploration of the relationship between language and religion. Very similar in form to other Routledge Handbooks (e.g., Burke, 2023), the chapters in the collection follow a set structure: they start with a description of various main issues followed by the main literature on the topic; a case study follows and each chapter finishes with implications and future research. Pihlaja and Ringrow (2024) emphasize the variety of different disciplinary and geographical backgrounds, which is reflected in the deliberate effort to integrate multiple approaches and methodologies. For instance, Mueller’s (2024: 96) chapter applies ‘a cognitive linguistics framework to the analysis of imagery encountered within the context of Buddhist workship’ to consider how the viewer may bring their embedded experiences, cultural knowledge and religious expectations to this multimodal context. Neary (2024), on the other hand, engages with stylistics more traditionally by investigating metaphors and the religious language underpinning many literary texts. Two other compelling chapters are Pihlaja's (2024) and Brookes, Clarke and McEnery’s (2024). The former explores how digital media affects religious discourse and more specifically, how religious identities and beliefs are altered by digital spaces. Pihlaja’s chapter highlights the importance of digital contexts for understanding contemporary religious communication and identity. Brookes et al. (2024) analyze how news media are capable of influencing attitudes towards religion (Islam in this case) by claiming that representation in the media is always partial, selective and ideologically-loaded. Using corpus methodologies, they provide objective evidence that stylistic choices such as metaphors or specific labels can reinforce biases and influence the public opinion. Despite the inherent but explicitly acknowledged limitations of an undertaking of this type, this handbook is an accurate reflection of one of the many ways in which it is possible to address the complexities of the study of religion. Pihlaja and Ringrow (2024) demonstrate again that stylistics offers powerful tools for decoding and understanding complex issues at the intersection of language and culture in contemporary society.

Building upon the discussion of identity construction in institutional and media discourse, the Caribbean Discourses: Stylistic and Critical Discourse Approaches (Durgasingh and Selvon-Ramkissoon, 2024) edited collection explicitly applies stylistic and critical discourse methodologies to explore linguistic practices pertaining to a wide array of Caribbean contexts, such as public policy (Selvon-Ramkissoon, 2024), social media (Walters, 2024), gender dynamics (Esposito et al., 2024) and literature (Mah-Chamberlain, 2024). In fact, ‘the multidisciplinary and multi-methodological nature of the discursive approaches in this collection’ (Durgasingh and Selvon-Ramkissoon, 2024: 9) is one of its key strengths. The study of Caribbean discourse has long devoted its attention almost exclusively to literary discourse and the Creole variety, whereas this volume opens a path of inquiry into the abovementioned contexts without disregarding literature in Part IV. The stylistic research in this volume makes it clear that the discipline has and still can contribute much to a ‘still-nascent’ broadening in the scholar investigation of Caribbean discourses.

8. Ecostylistics

The works discussed in this section demonstrate how stylistics contributes meaningfully to ecocritical debates by examining how language is used to reflect and/or challenge our relationship with the environment. Moreover, they are also a testament to the lack of complacency of stylistics and its timely contribution to a growing and hopeful bulk of research seeking to inform policy-making and spark conversations that concern both the planet and the disciplines involved. Ecostylistics reminds us that language leaves its own footprint and, some of those footprints, might just help the planet grow back.

As one of the keynote speakers of the PALA 2023 conference with an ecostylistic theme, Virdis (2024) builds on her previous work to address scholarly gaps in ecostylistic research. She focuses on ‘biodiveristy’ as a marker word and explores different dictionary definitions and activist discourse. Despite the fact that the case study is somewhat limited in length (235 words), Virdis makes up for it by adhering to the three methodological Rs of stylistics: rigour, retrievability and replicability. Virdis (2024) explains her framework in detail, combining basic stylistic notions with ecolinguistics. The article concludes that the ‘ecostylistic techniques […] help convey beneficial considerations aligning with the ecosophy and its seven norms’ (Virdis, 2024: 19). Moreover, by pairing dictionary definitions with activist discourse, the article reinforces the Environet, bridging academic work with vernacular activist expressions. Concerned with the ecostylistics of Victorian writing, Federici (2024) analyzes Richard Jefferies’ Wild Life in a Southern County, a text rich with instances of the interconnection between humans and the natural environment. Using the software #LancsBox, the study extracts all nominal groups referring to both human and non-human entities within the environmental context. Then, Federici (2024) explores the processes in which these entities serve as participants to carry out a transitivity and agency analysis. While the article offers an impressive volume of textual evidence, one may question whether the extraction of keywords alone warrants the use of the term ‘corpus linguistics methodology’ (Federici, 2024: 85). She concludes by highlighting the ecostylistic reading of Wild Life in a Southern County, supported by the strategies that ‘depict various constitutive elements of the natural world as active/agentive participants in […] chiefly Material, Mental, Relation, and Verbal processes’ (Federici, 2024: 85).

The gripping Applied Cognitive Ecostylistics: From Ego to Eco (Drewniok and Kuźniak, 2024) opens with a thought-provoking introduction by Stockwell (2024). He suggests that, whereas an application of stylistic frameworks and methods to texts with ecological concerns is still ‘essential and profound’, a radical alteration of the methodology would be ideal. He then calls for the integration of Ecology into the 4Es of cognition (embodied, extended, enactive and embedded) as a possible way to move towards a radical ecological stylistics. As is the case with all innovation, it is challenging to fathom what tools different from other cognitive approaches might arise. In the newfound era of individualism we seem to be living in, Stockwell argues for cognitive as integrative and interconnected methodology in a way that might subtly prompt the reader to reconsider the subtitle of the book. The rest of the collection addresses the issue of ecostylistics from different perspectives though I am able to discuss only some of them due to space constraints. For instance, Pager-McClymont and Stradling (2024) investigate whether instances of pathetic fallacy (PF) in texts function as textual triggers for narrative empathy. They draw on responses from 42 readers to Alice Walker’s short story The Flowers and combine data from think-aloud protocols and their own scoring system to analyze readers’ perception of PF in real time. While their study is the first to apply Fernandez-Quintanilla’s empathy framework to think-aloud data, they also acknowledge that ‘the open-ended nature of a think-aloud protocol limited PF perception analysis […] since participants chose to focus on other aspects of their experience in their responses (Pager-McClymont and Stradling, 2024: 89). Gavin (2024b) and Panagiotidou (2024) are both concerned with ekphrasis, ‘a literary phenomenon commonly defined as a retelling of a visual artwork’ (Gavin, 2024b: 173), but from different perspectives. Gavin (2024b) analyzes how the protagonist’s memories in Atwood’s Cat’s Eye are mediated through visual art by investigating narratorial voice. By contrast, Panagiotidou (2024) examines Rossetti’s sonnet ‘For a Venetian Pastoral by Giorgione (In the Louvre)’ and reframes ekphrasis as a dynamic and immersive process. She shows how conceptual metaphors and deixis, among other mechanisms, heighten what she terms the poem’s ‘transportational potential’ (Panagiotidou, 2024: 201). She also emphasizes that linguistic form can position the reader within the perceptual space of the painting and considers Rossetti’s sonnet as a highly immersive text that moves beyond description toward embodied cognition.

Another important contribution to the field of ecostylistics and ecomultimodality, the latter defined as ‘the multimodal perspective applied to communication instantiating the lifescape(s)’ (Bortoluzzi and Zurru, 2024: 7), is the edited collection Ecological Communication and Ecoliteracy: Discourse of Awareness and Action for the Lifescape. Bortoluzzi and Zurru (2024) emphasize the influential role of communication on what happens around us, on how we perceive it and on how we assess it according to our value systems. The philosophy of the book, grounded in Positive Discourse Analysis, prompts readers to take positive ecological action as well as to instruct them to bring about change. For instance, the ecoliteracy project that Zollo (2024) proposed to her students, based on communication strategies of the European Union, provided them with tools to become active agents of social change. Similarly, Zurru (2024) critically examines the widespread use of metaphors such as the ticking clock and time is running out in climate discourse to point out how they foster apocalyptic framings that may undermine public engagement. Drawing on ecolinguistics and metaphor scholarship, she calls for the strategic use and reframing of metaphors, suggesting implications for education through the idea that metaphors can be strategically reframed for social engagement rather than alarmism. Ecomultimodality also has a huge imprint in the book, with several chapters advancing the concept. Amideo (2024) explicitly analyzes ecological installations to argue for the role of multimodal interactions in fostering ecological consciousness. As can be concluded from the focus of the chapters, the volume’s key findings explicitly emphasize agency and the effectiveness of multimodal texts in promoting ecological awareness and action. Explicitly connecting methodological and thematic contributions with previous research in multimodal analysis, ecolinguistics and critical discourse studies, the book shows how stylistic choices profoundly shape discourses and actions.

9. Literary translation

Literary translation can shed some interesting light on how stylistic choices impact (or not depending on the translation’s success) on textual interpretation and the representation of identities across languages. As stylistics sharpens its focus on the textures of translated texts, it reveals literary translation not as a secondary act of transfer, but as a creative negotiation. In the works reviewed in this section, translators’ decisions at micro-levels such as focalization, characterization and dialect representation profoundly affect narrative perspective, social critiques and even the success of the translation. These stylistic choices foreground particular aspects, influencing reader perception and highlighting the inherent common ground to stylistics and translation practices.

Zhou and Xu (2024), in the second issue of this journal, evaluate John Minford’s translation of Songling’s Strange Tales, paying special attention to ‘The Laughing Girl’. The authors claim that the translation foregrounds novelty and strangeness, part of the translator’s own style, in detriment of other characteristics, such as social and moral critiques. This is achieved through changes at various levels, particularly toying with focalization, characterization and paratextual information. These issues could be mitigated if translators were trained in or collaborated with stylisticians, whose expertise in close textual analysis helps maintain features like focalization, tone and narrative perspective in translation. Also, in the pages of this journal (issue 1), Espunya (2024) investigates how characterization is achieved by narrative report of speech acts (NRSA) in the translations of Mansfield Park. Espunya (2024) considers NRSAs deserving of more attention given their potential ambiguity precisely because they hide who is really making a comment: is it the narrator or the character? The article highlights that the most successful translation in this investigation is that which is closest to the original, preserving the pragmatic richness of the author’s NRSA.

Transitioning from general discussions on stylistic choices and their impact on textual interpretation, Yu (2024) addresses the relatively underexplored area of literary dialect translation. Compared to conventional translation studies, this monograph highlights the stylistic dimension of translation, viewing literary dialects primarily as tools for constructing collective identities rooted in shared regional, social or ethnic backgrounds. Moreover, Yu (2024: 33) claims that ‘of various means of foregrounding, literary dialect is probably among the more dominant features’. That is, other devices may break literary conventions while still following basic grammar and vocabulary rules but literary dialect, by breaking language rules, is arguably more noticeable (and rejected) by readers. Given the emphasis on reader perception and potential rejection of literary dialect, future research in cognitive stylistics, particularly reader-response studies, could significantly contribute empirical insights to validate or refine these claims. The impressive data sample (277 translations of Huckleberry Finn, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Pygmalion) allows Yu to provide comprehensive coverage of dialect translation practices across different periods. However, beyond the size of the corpus, the book’s key strength lies in its combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses. Yu introduces the Dialect Frequency Measure (DFM), which puts a spin on the concept of Dialect Density used in sociolinguistics. The DFM calculates the proportion of dialect features relative to the overall content so that researchers can evaluate the stylistic effects created by altering dialect frequency, such as changes in character identity or narrative voice. Yu’s discussion of the selected case studies illuminates the negotiation and reconstruction of ethnic, social and gender identities, enhancing the understanding of how dialect translation can redefine social hierarchies.

10. Conclusion

In revisiting the work done in stylistics over the past 2 years, I am not left with the impression of a fixed image but one that moves. Each piece of research here is a reflection of the field’s vitality, responsiveness and, more importantly, its imagination. In the introduction, I claimed stylistics as being not only in the world but of the world and this review bears witness to that claim. The discipline has not merely tracked the world’s complexities but has actively engaged with them. Across different continents and contexts, stylistics continues to expand its scope: from Victorian ecology to country music, from Indigenous TV series to multimodal metaphors in medical animations. In doing so, it disarms the false dichotomy between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and affirms that style is not the property of a privileged few. It is fitting that the most innovative stylistic work is often found at the margins of genres, geographies or disciplinary borders for it is in these liminal spaces that stylistics does what it does best: listen closely and ask precisely. As the field continues to grow, vertically into deeper theoretical reflection and horizontally into new modes and mediums, it also reaffirms its commitment to the world. In short, stylistics in and of the world is not a slogan, but a method, a promise and a poetics.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Ministerio de Universidades. Contratos FPU 2022.

ORCID iD

Adrián Castro

Note

Author biography

Adrián Castro is a doctoral candidate funded by the Spanish Government at the English department of the University of Granada, where he currently lectures in English Language. His main research interest lies in stylistics, more specifically corpus stylistics, which he applies in his doctoral dissertation to investigate verbal and non-verbal language in the genre of fantasy. He has published in various outlets such as Language and Literature, the Journal of Literary Semantics and forthcoming book chapters in Routledge and Bloomsbury. Further research interests include pop culture, critical discourse analysis and multimodality.

References

Adam

(2024) More than ‘ignorant bushbaby bullshit’. The racialised metaperspective as mind style in Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014). English Text Construction 17(1): 83–105. DOI: 10.1075/etc.00063.ada.

Adami

(2024) Remaking the sense(s) in Sumana Roy’s How I Became a Tree: a stylistic analysis. In: Pillière

Sorlin

(eds) Style and Sense(s). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 209–231.

Amideo

(2024) Unreliable narratives and social-ecological memory in Kara Walker’s A Subtlety. In: Bortoluzzi

Zurru

(eds) Ecological Communication and Ecoliteracy: Discourses of Awareness and Action for the Lifescape. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 112–131.

Bartley

Piergiorgio

(2024) ‘We can fix this. Let’s get you out of trouble, son’: An analysis of the transitivity and appraisal patterns in the Netflix TV show When They See Us. Applied Linguistics, Advance online publication DOI: 10.1093/applin/amae081.

Bednarek

(2023) Language and Characterisation in Television Series: A Corpus-Informed Approach to the Construction of Social Identity in the Media. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Bednarek

Meek

(2024) ‘Whitefellas got miserable language skills’: Differentiation, scripted speech, and Indigenous discourses. Language in Society 54: 1–26. DOI: 10.1017/S0047404523000994.

Belligon

(2024a) The voices I hear are not, or not only, in my head’: transmission through sounds in Ian McEwan’s Nutshell. Études de Stylistique Anglaise 19. DOI: 10.4000/11rfk.

Belligon

(2024b) The sense of the sense of smell in Virginia Woolf’s Flush. In: Pillière

Sorlin

(eds) Style and Sense(s). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 73–95.

Benammar

(2024) “SO FUCKING CUTE IM DYING”: The use of hyperbole on X. Études de Stylistique Anglaise 19. DOI: 10.4000/11rfp.

10.

Bort-Mir

(2019) Developing, Applying, and Testing FILMIP. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Spain: University Jaume I. https://www.tdx.cat/handle/10803/666927#page=1

11.

Bortoluzzi

Zurru

(eds) (2024) Ecological Communication and Ecoliteracy: Discourses of Awareness and Action for the Lifescape. London: Bloomsbury.

12.

Boucher

Giovanelli

Harrison

Love

Godfrey

(2024) Reading Habits in the COVID-19 Pandemic. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

13.

Bourdeau

(2024) The narrative mechanics of transmission in Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart (2012): Hostile environments vs. readerly reflexes. Études de Stylistique Anglaise 19. DOI: 10.4000/11rfj.

14.

Brannon

(2023) Language, Cognition, and Emotion in Keats’s Poetry. London and New York: Routledge.

15.

Bray

(2024) The letter-writing manual and the epistolary novel. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 47(1): 15–29. DOI: 10.1111/1754-0208.12930.

16.

Brookes

Clarke

McEnery

(2024) Representation of religion in news media discourse. In: Pihlaja

Ringrow

(eds) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Religion. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 180–193.

17.

Burke

(ed.) (2023) The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. 2nd edition. London: Routledge.

18.

Canning

(2023) Forensic stylistics. In: Burke

(ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. 2nd edition. London: Routledge, pp. 521–541.

19.

Carney

Lugea

Fernández-Quintanilla

Devine

(2023) “Sometimers, Alzheimer’s? I love that! That’s definitely me”: Readers’ responses to fictional dementia narratives. The Gerontologist 63(10): 1610–1618. DOI: 10.1093/geront/gnad055.

20.

Drewniok

Kuźniak

(eds) (2024) Applied Cognitive Ecostylistics: From Ego to Eco. London: Bloomsbury.

21.

Durgasingh

Selvon-Ramkissoon

(eds) (2024) Caribbean Discourses: Stylistic and Critical Discourse Approaches to Language Use in the Caribbean. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

22.

Emmott

Alexander

(2024) ‘You see, but you do not observe’: Sensory manipulation and sense-making in the Sherlock Holmes detective stories. In: Pillière

Sorlin

(eds) Style and Sense(s). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 125–148.

23.

Esposito

Selvon-Ramkissoon

Durgasingh

(2024) Digital discourses on gender-based violence in Trinidad and Tobago. In: Durgasingh

Selvon-Ramkissoon

(eds) Caribbean Discourses: Stylistic and Critical Discourse Approaches to Language Use in the Caribbean. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 287–322.

24.

Federici

(2024) Transitivity and agency in Richard Jefferies’s rural essays: An ecostylistic analysis. Journal of Literary Semantics 53(1): 67–87. DOI: 10.1515/jls-2024-2004.

25.

Filardo-Llamas

Roldán-García

(2024) From the closet to the stars. Metaphoric construals of gender identity in Tumblr. A case study. In: Romano

(ed.) Metaphor in Socio-Political Contexts: Current Crises. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 51–80.

26.

Forceville

(2024a) Identifying and interpreting visual and multimodal metaphor in commercial and feature films. Metaphor and Symbol 39(1): 40–54. DOI: 10.1080/10926488.2023.2271544.

27.

Forceville

(2024b) Identifying and interpreting visual metaphors in political cartoons. In: Romano

(ed.) Metaphor in Socio-Political Contexts: Current Crises. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 255–278.

28.

Gavin

(2024a) Creative writing practice of ekphrastic intervention: A case study of literary responses to A Blind Girl Reading by Ejnar Nielsen. In: Pillière

Sorlin

(eds) Style and Sense(s). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 259–282.

29.

Gavin

(2024b) Fictional ekphrasis representing childhood trauma in M Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. In: Drewniok

Kuźniak

(eds) Applied Cognitive Ecostylistics: From Ego to Eco. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 171–188.

30.

Gebraad

Forceville

(2024) Facing cancer: Metaphors in medical animation films. Visual Communication, (Online first article). DOI: 10.1177/14703572241229061.

31.

Gibbons

(2023) A cognitive approach to multimodal autobiographical elegy. In: Gibbons

King

(eds) Reading the Contemporary Author: Narrative, Authority, Fictionality. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 85–110.

32.

Gibbons

King

(eds) (2023) Reading the Contemporary Author: Narrative, Authority, Fictionality. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.

33.

Gillings

(2024) Politics, religion, and drama. Exploring the metapragmatics of hypocrisy. In: Sorlin

Virtanen

(eds) The Pragmatics of Hypocrisy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 44–73.

34.

Giovanelli

(2023) Stylistics and children’s literature. In: Burke

(ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. 2nd edition. London: Routledge, pp. 542–559.

35.

Giovanelli

Harrison

(2024) Cognitive Grammar in Stylistics: A Practical Guide. 2nd edition. London/New York/Dublin: Bloomsbury.

36.

González

(2023) The permissible author: Cultural politics and the market economy of the literary sphere. In: Gibbons

King

(eds) Reading the Contemporary Author: Narrative, Authority, Fictionality. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 43–63.

37.

Haines

(2024) Comic timing in prose fiction. Journal of Literary Semantics 53(2): 93–109. DOI: 10.1515/jls-2024-2007.

38.

Halmari

(2024) Apology as hypocrisy. Examples from Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. In: Sorlin

Virtanen

(eds) The Pragmatics of Hypocrisy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 124–160.

39.

Hamawand

(2023) English Stylistics: A Cognitive Grammar Approach. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

40.

Harrison

(2023) Stylistics and cognitive grammar. In: Burke

(ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. 2nd edition. London: Routledge, pp. 314–329.

41.

Harrison

(2024) The Language of Margaret Atwood. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

42.

Haugh

(2024) Ostensible offers, politeness and sincere hypocrisy. In: Sorlin

Virtanen

(eds) The Pragmatics of Hypocrisy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 162–186.

43.

Ikeo

Shigematsu

Nakao

(2024) A Corpus Stylistics Approach to Contemporary Present-Tense Narrative. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

44.

King

(2023) Dead authors tell no tales: The ailing author-character in contemporary novels about novelists. In: Gibbons

King

(eds) Reading the Contemporary Author: Narrative, Authority, Fictionality. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 199–218.

45.

Kizelbach

(2024) The pragmatics of royal discourse in William Shakespeare’s Henry VI. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 25(1): 1–32. DOI: 10.1075/jhp.19012.kiz.

46.

Lugea

Walker

(2023) Stylistics: Text, Cognition and Corpora. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

47.

Lugea

Fernández-Quintanilla

Carney

Devine

(2024) Is there truth in fiction? Lessons from readers’ responses to dementia fiction. Medical Humanities 5(1): 129–139. DOI: 10.1136/medhum-2024-012976.

48.

Mah-Chamberlain

(2024) Selvon’s stylistics: Self-conscious language production in An Island is a World. In: Durgasingh

Selvon-Ramkissoon

(eds) Caribbean Discourses: Stylistic and Critical Discourse Approaches to Language Use in the Caribbean. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 237–258.

49.

Mathe

(2024) Analysing discourse-stylistics on peripheral journalism platforms: A context of indigenous language news outlets on Facebook. African Journalism Studies 45(2): 94–114. DOI: 10.1080/23743670.2024.2388640.

50.

Montoro

Werner

(2024) Introduction: interdisciplinary approaches to the language of pop culture. English Text Construction 16(2): 109–118. DOI: 10.1075/etc.22028.mon.

51.

Montoro

Zaganor

(2024) Chick lit. Characterisation through laughter-talk in conversational humour. English Text Construction 16(2): 214–237. DOI: 10.1075/etc.00057.mon.

52.

Mooshamer

Dominique

Henrik

Meinhardt

Olina

Christin-Walch

Xia

(2023) The phonaesthetics of constructed languages: Results from an online rating experiment. In: Noletto

Norledge

and Stockwell

(eds) Reading Fictional Languages. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 93–111.

53.

Mueller

(2024) Symbols and icons in Buddhist worship. In: Pihlaja

Ringrow

(eds) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Religion. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 96–108.

54.

Nakao

(2024) Thackeray-type narrator revisited: Portrayal of characters’ minds as narratorial performance in Vanity Fair. Journal of Literary Semantics 53(1): 19–38.

55.

Neary

(2024) Analysing metaphor in religious discourse in literature. In: Pihlaja

Ringrow

(eds) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Religion. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 109–121.

56.

Noletto

(2024) Fictional Languages in Science Fiction Literature: Stylistic Explorations. New York and Abingdon: Routledge.

57.

Noletto

Norledge

Stockwell

(eds) (2023) Reading Fictional Languages. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

58.

Pager-McClymont

Stradling

(2024) Using think-aloud data to explore pathetic fallacy’s impact on narrative empathy. In: Drewniok

Kuźniak

(eds) Applied Cognitive Ecostylistics: From Ego to Eco. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 69–98.

59.

Panagiotidou

(2024) Body, mind, and nature in Rossetti’s ‘For a Venetian pastoral by Giorgione (In the Louvre)’. In: Drewniok

Kuźniak

(eds) Applied Cognitive Ecostylistics: From Ego to Eco. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 189–206.

60.

Peterssen

Soares da Silva

(2024) Polarising metaphors in far-right populist tweets: A comparative crosslinguistic study. In: Romano

(ed.) Metaphor in Socio-Political Contexts: Current Crises. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 107–134.

61.

Pihlaja

(2024) Language, religion, and the digital world. In: Pihlaja

Ringrow

(eds) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Religion. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 122–133.

62.

Pihlaja

Ringrow

(eds) (2024) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Religion. Abingdon: Routledge.

63.

Pillière

Sorlin

(eds) (2024) Style and Sense(s). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

64.

Price

(2023) A corpus stylistic approach to mental health. In: Burke

(ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. 2nd edition. London: Routledge, pp. 560–576.

65.

Ras

Koning

(2024) The disappearance of ‘poverty’ in Dutch House of Representatives debates on the sexual exploitation of children in travel and tourism (SECTT). Discourse & Society 36(3): 400–415. DOI: 10.1177/09579265241288586.

66.

Romano

(ed.) (2024) Metaphor in Socio-Political Contexts: Current Crises. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.

67.

Schubert

(2024) Tarantino’s eloquent villains. A pragma-stylistics approach to suspense. English Text Construction 16(2): 119–143. DOI: 10.1075/etc.22022.sch.

68.

Selvon-Ramkissoon

(2024) Critical discourse studies and curriculum development in Trinidad and Tobago: Exploring discursive practices in education policy. In: Durgasingh

Selvon-Ramkissoon

(eds) Caribbean Discourses: Stylistic and Critical Discourse Approaches to Language Use in the Caribbean. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 79–106.

69.

Seracini

(2024) Value metaphors in films: A corpus-based analysis of the representation of core values in American movies. L’analisi Linguistica e Letteraria XXXI 31(3): 69–92. https://www.analisilinguisticaeletteraria.eu/index.php/ojs/article/view/603

70.

Sorlin

(2024a) How pragmatically (in)definite are you and one? Pronominal imposture in George Orwell’s Down and out in Paris and London (1933). In: Gill

Malmivirta

Wårvik

(eds) Structures in Discourse. Interaction, Adaptability, and Pragmatic Functions. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 36–57.

71.

Sorlin

(2024b) The pragmatics of racism in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American lyric (2014). English Studies 105(6): 926–944. DOI: 10.1080/0013838X.2024.2348933.

72.

Sorlin

(2024c) Transmission through pronominal displacement in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Tomorrow is too far” (2009). Études de Stylistique Anglaise 19. DOI: 10.4000/11rfi.

73.

Sorlin

(2024d) You as a stylistic vector of otherness: from self-ascription to enactment in Kincaid (1988), Adichie (2009) and Azumah Nelson (2021). Journal of Literary Semantics 53(1): 1–17. DOI: 10.1515/jls-2024-2001.

74.

Šorm

Steen

(2018) VISMIP: Towards a method for visual metaphor identification. In: Steen

(ed.) Visual Metaphor: Structure and Process. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 47–88.

75.

Stockwell

(2024) Introduction: A new ecology of language. In: Drewniok

Kuźniak

(eds) Applied Cognitive Ecostylistics: From Ego to Eco. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 1–12.

76.

Tanskanen

(2024) “Ding ding ding we have a hypocrite!” The metapragmatics of verbal hypocrisy in discussion forum interaction. In: Sorlin

Virtanen

(eds) The Pragmatics of Hypocrisy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 74–95.

77.

Toolan

(2024) To make you hear, make you feel, make you see: Representing sense-perceptions in narrative fiction. In: Pillière

Sorlin

(eds) Style and Sense(s). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 51–72.

78.

van Peer

Chesnokova

(2024) “The sound must seem an echo to the sense”: Experiencing oral and silent reading of poetry. In: Pillière

Sorlin

(eds) Style and Sense(s). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 235–258. DOI: 10.1075/etc.23003.wal.

79.

Virdis

(2024) Biodiversity’ in Extinction Rebellion’s words: An ecostylistic examination of a beneficial text. Cogent Arts & Humanities 11: 1. DOI: 10.1080/23311983.2024.2360799.

80.

Walshe

(2024) Brogues and Blarney: The representation of Irish speech in American comics. English Text Construction 16(2): 238–260. DOI: 10.1075/etc.23003.wal.

81.

Walters

(2024) “The most honourable brogad”: A critical discourse analysis of Jamaica’s prime minister as hero, sex symbol and villain on social media. In: Durgasingh

Selvon-Ramkissoon

(eds) Caribbean Discourses: Stylistic and Critical Discourse Approaches to Language Use in the Caribbean. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 177–212.

82.

Werner

Ledermann

(2024) Styling authenticity in country music. Languages 9(5): 168. DOI: 10.3390/languages9050168.

83.

Whitney

McDermott

Cerdan

Bloomstein

Randall

Bednarek

Meek

(2024) Language use in indigenous-authored television series. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 9(1): 1–14. DOI: 10.3765/plsa.v9i1.5702.

84.

Wong

(2024) Disaffection and you-narration in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Tambudzai trilogy (1988-2018). Diegesis 13(1): 102–121.

85.

(2024) Dialect, Voice, and Identity in Chinese Translation: A Descriptive Study of Chinese Translations of Huckleberry Finn, Tess, and Pygmalion. London and New York: Routledge.

86.

Zollo

(2024) Positive multimodal analysis of EU learning materials to promote ecoliteracy for young people. In: Bortoluzzi

Zurru

(eds) Ecological Communication and Ecoliteracy: Discourses of Awareness and Action for the Lifescape. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 235–256.

87.

Zurru

(2024) Communicating the urgency of the climate emergency through verbal and non-verbal metaphors. In: Bortoluzzi

Zurru

(eds) Ecological Communication and Ecoliteracy: Discourses of Awareness and Action for the Lifescape. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 88–111.