Contextualized Stylistics: In Honour of Peter Verdonk

Front Cover
Tony Bex, Michael Burke, Peter Stockwell
Rodopi, 2000 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 278 pages
The articles in Contextualized Stylistics, written especially to honour the work of Peter Verdonk, one of the leading figures in the field of stylistics over the last twenty years, represent the state of the art in literary linguistics. A wide range of approaches, from traditional stylistic analysis to innovative new directions, is to be found here in literary contexts as varied as the writings of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, Sterne, Browning, Yeats, Auden, Joyce, British surrealist poetry, urban and political graffiti, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Gardam, contemporary Anglo-Irish fiction, modern comic satire and Flann O'Brien. Among the contributors are some of the foremost theorists and practitioners working in the field today: Walter Nash, Peter Stockwell, Willie van Peer, Keith Green, Tony Bex, Michael Burke, Mick Short, Jonathan Culpeper, Elena Semino, Michael Toolan, Jean-Jacques Weber, Gerard Steen, Henry Widdowson, and Paul Simpson. Olga Fischer and Katie Wales contribute a Foreword, and Ronald Carter an Afterword. A number of Professor Verdonk's colleagues have also contributed articles from a more literary perspective. This book is an essential addition to the personal library of any researcher interested in the interface and connections between language and literature, and it would make an excellent course reader for undergraduate students in both literary and linguistic studies.

From inside the book

Contents

The Writing on the Wall
1
From Text to Contextualizing
15
Hidden Meanings
39
An Approach
67
The Vitality of Yeats Dialogic Verse
85
The Woe That Is in Marriage
103
Jane Gardams Bilgewater
131
Michael Toolan
153
Joycean Sonicities
173
Robert Brownings
195
Tristram Shandys Narratees
209
The Unrecoverable Context
229
With a Note
243
Afterword
267
Copyright

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Page 90 - A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead.
Page 40 - About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along...
Page 117 - No man is an Hand, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
Page 237 - You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, As full of grief as age; wretched in both! If it be you that stir these daughters...
Page 121 - Can well direct him where to looke for it. And freely men confesse that this world's spent, When in the Planets, and the Firmament They seeke so many new; they see that this Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies. 'Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone; All just supply, and all Relation...
Page 78 - As shades more sweetly recommend the light, So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit: For works may have more wit than does 'em good, As bodies perish through excess of blood.
Page 116 - Honor or his Grace, Or the King's real, or his stamped face Contemplate, what you will, approve — So you will let me love.
Page 77 - First follow Nature, and your judgment frame By her just standard, which is still the same: Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, One clear, unchanged, and universal light, Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart, At once the source, and end, and test of Art. Art from that fund each just supply provides; Works without show, and without pomp presides: In some fair body thus th...
Page 28 - Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view — created a new thought for that object.