Geoffrey Leech - Language in Literature: Style and Foregrounding

Advance praise for Language in Literature

This book will no doubt become yet another of Geoff Leechs 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.

Geoff Leech writes so clearly and engagingly about stylistic topics that reading this book is pure pleasure. He resolves the dispute between literary criticism and stylistics in one chapter, clarifies the difference between aesthetic response and analysis in another and amongst other things deals with recent developments in corpus stylistics and applications of pragmatics to literature in others. This book is replete with theoretical debate, detailed analysis of literary texts and commonsense pronouncements on stylistic conundrums. It establishes once and for all that stylistics has a valuable place at the heart of literary studies and in the pantheon of linguistic approaches to meaning.

This will be a book to treasure!

Lesley Jeffries, Professor of English Language and chair of PALA (the Poetics and Linguistics Association), University of Huddersfield, Author of The Language of Twentieth Century Poetry (1993 Palgrave) and Textual Construction of the Female Body (2007 Palgrave)

I have been waiting expectantly for some years for this promised collection of Geoffrey Leechs 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. Leech has supplemented those papers we all read avidly when they first appeared (and still recommend regularly to our students) with some fascinating new work. We have a new two-chapter account of Virginia Woolfs short story The Mark on the Wall, which nicely combines more traditional stylistic analysis with the new corpus-stylistic approach, as well as two chapters on the nature and philosophy of Stylistics and its relation to Literary Criticism. The analysis of The Mark on the Wall has that remarkable combination of clarity, sensitivity and sureness of critical touch that Geoffrey Leech is so well-known for, and the philosophical discussions are full of his usual acute observation and balanced good sense. The Master has returned and we are all the better for it!

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. Always sensitive and sensible, they confirm the perennial value of close engagement with the text as a basis for critical judgements.

Katie Wales, Research Professor in English, University of Sheffield; author of the Dictionary of Stylistics (2001 revised 2nd edn) (Pearson Education)

Style and Foregrounding

Geoffrey Leech

First published 2008 by Pearson Education Limited

Published 2013 by Routledge
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Copyright 2008, Taylor & Francis.

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ISBN: 978-0-582-05109-6 (pbk)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data

Leech, Geoffrey N.
Language in literature: style and foregrounding / Geoffrey Leech.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-582-05109-6
1. English language-Style. 2. English literature-History and criticismTheory, etc. 3. English literature-Explication. 4. Style, Literary. I. Title.
PE1421.L37
2008 808'.042-dc22

2008016971

Set by 35 in 9/11.5 pt Palatino

This book has been a long time a-coming. Towards the end of the 1980s I found I had built up a small collection of articles on 'practical stylistics' how to analyse the language of poems, passages of prose, and so on and that these had presented somewhat different facets of a consistent approach, with emphasis on the concept of foregrounding. During the period that I wrote these papers, I was intimately involved in the teaching of stylistics as a 'link course' between language and literature, at first at University College London, and then in our School of English at Lancaster University.

From the 1970s, I went through a period of being distracted, and sometimes overwhelmed, with other non-literary interests and preoccupations. In particular, I was engaged in the swiftly developing field of pragmatics (applied to stylistic topics in of this book) and in the equally swiftly developing field of corpus linguistics. These took me away from literary studies, but I never lost my interest and joy in examining literary texts closely, to see how they work in terms of language and its interpretation. When I look back on more than forty years of research and publication, it is working on language in English literature that has given me most enduring pleasure. Recently, I was engaged with my colleague Mick Short, with preparing a second edition of our book Style in Fiction (1981; second edition 2007), and this was the chief impetus for getting involved again in reading, thinking and publishing in stylistics.

During the fallow period (roughly 1990 to 2005) whenever I was invited to give a lecture on stylistics, I trotted out my ideas on a fascinating text of Virginia Woolfs, The Mark on the Wall, which never ceased to puzzle and engage me. This lecture, duly reworked and elaborated, has become of this book, one of the three final chapters not previously published.