The literature of stylistics is enormous and extremely diffuse in focus. The two aspects of the meaning of the word ‘style’ treated in the text above represent two emphases or directions of study, and the influence of these emphases is to be felt in many studies, in more or less palpable form. However, the literature includes articles and books in old-fashioned literary criticism, old-fashioned philosophical and psychological criticism, and, indeed, in every sort of criticism, old- or new-fashioned, and in every conceivable field. This note is, therefore, highly selective. For an article which sums up the diverse trends in stylistics in a short compass, consult Freeman, D. C, ‘Linguistics and the Study of Literature: Ends and Beginnings’, in Brown, H. D., and Wardhaugh, R. (eds), A Survey of Applied Linguistics (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, (forthcoming). An earlier treatment of the diversity of the field is Hough, G., Style and Stylistics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969). In both of these references there are useful bibliographical guides. This is also true of Enkvist, N. E., Linguistic Stylistics (The Hague: Mouton, 1973).
There are two general bibliographies of stylistic studies in English: Milic, L. T., Style and Stylistics: an Analytical Bibliography (New York: The Free Press, 1967); Bailey, R. W., and Burton, D., SND, English Stylistics: a Bibliography (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968).
The basic bibliography for studies in Romance stylistics is Hatzfeld, H., A Critical Bibliography of the New Stylistics, Applied to the Romance Literatures, 1900–52 (Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature, 5, 1953). For later work in Romance stylistics, see Hatzfeld, H., and Le Hir, Y., Essai de Bibliographie Critique de Stylistic Française et Romane, 1955–1960 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961). Todorov, T., ‘Les Etudes du Style: Bibliographie Selective’, Poétique, 2 (1970), pp. 224–32, is also to be consulted. See also the ‘Selective Bibliography’ by Martin, H. C, and Ohmann, R. in Candelaria, F. (ed.), Perspectives on Style (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1968).
There are a number of journals in the field, of which Language and Style: an International Journal, Style, and Lingua e Stile are devoted specifically to the topics of linguistic stylistics. (Style publishes a continuing series of bibliographical articles.) The Annual Bibliography of the Modern Language Association has a section devoted to stylistics. Other continuing bibliographies are to be found in the Bibliographie Linguistique, the Tear's Work in English Studies, the Tear's Work in Modern Language Studies, and Language and Language Behavior Abstracts.
There are a number of collections of essays in stylistics which collectively give a good picture of the range of techniques available to the student of linguistics and literature. Sebeok, T. A. (ed.), Style in Language (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), contains a number of interesting articles, including Jakobson's seminal statement on the poetic function of language – the concentration by the hearer/reader on the ‘code’ of the message in its own terms. The essay by C. F. Voegelin makes the useful distinction between ‘casual’ and ‘non-casual’ speech situations, with literary situations being ‘non-casual’. Other useful anthologies in the field are Chat-man, S., and Levin, S. R. (eds), Essays in the Language of Literature (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1967), and Love, G. A., and Payne, M. (eds), Contemporary Essays on Style (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). See especially the essays by Riffaterre and Milic (in Chatman and Levin) on criteria for style analysis, and on the problems involved in making a typology of styles.
The most up to date and, in some ways, the widest ranging of the anthologies is Freeman, D. C. (ed.), Linguistics and Literary Style, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970). Especially useful is the section on the method of linguistic analysis of literary artefacts, containing theoretical and practical descriptions of specific methods of analysis. A more traditional collection is Cunningham, J. V., The Problem of Style (New York: Fawcett Books, 1966), which contains generally short selections from a wide range of contributors, only a few of whom can be termed linguists. Other anthologies include Chatman, S. (ed.), Literary Style: a Symposium (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), Fowler, R., Style and Structure in Literature: Essays in the New Stylistics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), and Ringbom, H. (ed.), Style and Text: Studies presented to Nils Erik Enkvist (Stockholm: Språkförlaget Skriptor, 1975). A small volume containing essays from a meeting of the English Institute edited by S. Chatman (Approaches to Poetics, New York: Columbia University Press, 1973) contains six essays of considerable interest, by V. Erlich, H. Davidson, F. Kermode, R. Ohmann, S. Fish and T. Todorov, on the systems of Jakobson and Barthes and on stylistic methodology in general. Fish's article asks the important question, ‘What is stylistics and why are they saying such terrible things about it?’ and answers it with a close examination of some prevalent assumptions made by stylisticians.
Some other, rather more specialized, anthologies are Levine, G., and Madden, W. (eds), The Art of Victorian Prose (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), and Dolezel, L., and Bailey, R. W. (eds), Statistics and Style (New York, London and Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1969). (See also their Annotated Bibliography of Statistical Stylistics, in the Michigan Slavic Series, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1968.)
The materials and bibliographical listings in the above works and in those additional works mentioned in the footnotes to this book can provide an interested student with an entry into a field of enormous interest and complexity.