This chapter extend the discussion of the basic principles of stylistics by introducing some of its core activities. In particular, it considers the origins of stylistics in Russian formalism. The chapter shows how the principles that underpinned this literary movement were combined with the emerging descriptive techniques of linguistics to offer an insight into meaning that placed the text at the heart of the interpretative enterprise.

This book describes and explains the discipline of stylistics, the linguistic study of style in language. The authors’ account of stylistics roughly follows its development over time, beginning with its origins in the Russian formalist work of the early twentieth century and ending with the current state of the art as informed by recent research in cognitive and corpus stylistics. The authors’ aim in presenting this account is to establish anew the importance, coherence and achievements of stylistics and to argue for its status as a subdiscipline of linguistics. This opening chapter outlines in general terms what the label stylistics refers to, before going on to explain the necessary steps involved in the linguistic study of style and the main theoretical principles of the field.

Videogames once seemed like they would have a part to play in the future of the book – the natural evolution of literary practice onto more expressly interactive digital platforms. Today, despite numerous compelling examples of videogames that support literary engagement, the comparison can seem strange, clichéd, banal, and beside the point. This chapter attempts to reset the comparison of videogames and literature for the present moment of digital culture. First, it presents a brief history of critical perspectives on videogames as literature. Second, it reflects on the contemporary status of and challenges to videogaming’s literary aspirations following recent shifts in the industry’s design priorities and monetization practices. This chapter does not present an argument regarding the status of games as literature. Rather, its goal is to describe the urgent work of literary studies in continuing to rethink digital gaming in the unfolding digital age.

Roberto Bolaño was the only Latin American novelist of the post-Boom period who attained notoriety similar to that of his famous predecessors. Exploring what makes his brief Nocturno de Chiles worthy of such canonical status, I propose five criteria of evaluation: 1) elevated themes, as put forth by Longinus; 2) a self-reflexive literary warp; 3) an unfathomable secret; 4) transformation of received tradition; and 5) a style at once profound, unique, and recognizable. The confession of a priest, Sebastián, presumably on his death bed, the novel recounts his life, including his concomitant vocations for the priesthood and literature. Longinian elevation is manifest comically. The protagonist’s immersion in both the classical and the modern provides literariness. The secret resides in the presence of an Austrian shoemaker whose monument to national heroes seems to point to the origins of fascism. Sebastián’s consideration of current Chilean writers and their knowledge of universal works, such as the Divine Comedy becomes a consideration of literary tradition. And his elegant, erudite style is evident from the very beginning. In the end he and the reader realize that the “wizened youth” who challenges him as his conscience throughout is the one writing the novel.

In one of the reviews of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, an anonymous reviewer for the Swedenborgian Christian Spiritualist conceives of Whitman’s poetry (and poetry more broadly) as aligning with a tradition of spiritual mediumship.1 The great poets, that is, possess a medial capacity to channel and develop a “spiritual intercourse” with the muse, who is herself part of the transcendent realm. Having distinguished between the “two permanent types” of media – those singular agents who are lucky enough to receive “direct influx” from the divine source of love and wisdom, and a “second class of media” that channel “individual Spirits” and “societies of Spirits” – the reviewer proceeds to outline what is happening to the idea of mediumship as society transitions into a new and disorienting phase. “Many varieties of Mediumship,” the reviewer argues, “must be expected” in this moment of social and political turmoil, and not all of them either savory or desirable. The present age now produces imitators who merely “pour forth as Divine Revelations the froth and scum of a receding age”; confidence men who give “false notions of the state of man after death”; as well as other suspect figures who merely “come in contact with the outmost portion of the Spirit-life.” Then there are those more exceptional beings, best exemplified by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who “receive influxes from the upper mind-sphere of the age” and “[see] the future of truths as our Spirit-seers discern the future of man.”2

This chapter offers a framework for understanding how the work gathered under the sign ‘J. M. Coetzee’ has reached – and been received – by multiple publics, from agents, editors, and publishers to a range of readers including critics, censors, interviewers, and literary prize judges. It considers the role of institutional mediation in the processes of making meaning, also highlighting some of the ways in which Coetzee has had to navigate amongst complex local and global value-conferring operations in the service of making a career, yet has sought too to disrupt the terms under which cultural capital accrues. Addressing the circuitous routes through which his first books, Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country, reached their first readers (and elicited a range of responses), the chapter also considers a number of controversies in the 1980s that served as flashpoints for Coetzee’s negotiation of the demand that a writer speak, in certain circumstances, in their own person. Finally, it assesses the impact of these processes and contexts for such later works as Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year and occasions such as Coetzee’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech and his many public readings and other interventions since.