Language In Literature Style and Foregrounding

“This book will no doubt become yet another of Geoff Leech’s classic works in stylistics. It demonstrates that what he was writing in the 1960s remains central to the study of literary language, and that he remains at the cutting edge of the subject nearly forty years later.”

Lesley Jeffries, Professor of English Language, University of Huddersfield

“I have been waiting expectantly for some years for this promised collection of Geoffrey Leech’s Stylistics papers to be published. We now have a convenient location for all those influential Leechian papers scattered through journals and book collections as well as some fascinating new work.”

Mick Short, Professor of English Language and Literature, Lancaster University

“This volume, by a founder of British stylistics, is long overdue. His articles, now usefully 'refreshed', mark the development of the discipline over forty years, from formalist functionalism to corpus stylistics.”

Katie Wales, Research Professor in English, University of Sheffield

Over a period of more than forty years, Geoffrey Leech has made notable contributions to the field of literary stylistics, using the interplay between linguistic form and literary function as a key to the ‘mystery’ of how a text comes to be invested with artistic potential. In this book, seven earlier papers and articles have been brought together with four new chapters, the whole volume showing a continuity of approach across a period when all too often literary and linguistic studies have appeared to drift further apart. Leech sets the concept of ‘foregrounding’ at the heart of the interplay between form and interpretation. Through practical and insightful examination of how poems, plays and prose works produce special meaning, he counteracts the ‘flight from the text’ that has characterized thinking about language and literature in the last thirty years, when the response of the reader, rather than the characteristics and meaning potential of the text itself, have been given undue prominence. The book provides an enlightening analysis of well-known (as well as less well-known) texts of great writers of the past, including Keats, Shelley, Samuel Johnson, Shaw, Dylan Thomas, and Virginia Woolf.

Geoffrey Leech is Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics at Lancaster University. He has written, co-edited and co-authored over 25 books, including A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, Style in Fiction (with Mick Short), and A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (with Sidney Greenbaum and Jan Svartvik). Professor Leech is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of Academia Europaea