Language in Literature

Over a period of over 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, read previously only by a restricted audience, 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 (also known as defamiliarization) 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.

Professor Leech is Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics at Lancaster University. He has written, co-edited and co-authored over 25 books and over 100 articles in the areas of linguistics and English language, especially in stylistics, English grammar, semantics, pragmatics and corpus linguistics. He was co-author, with Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum and Jan Svartvik, of the monumental and authoritative A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Longman 1985). In pragmatics, too, his Principles of Pragmatics (Longman 1983) has been a landmark text. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Member of Academia Europaea.

Preface Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: about this book, its content and its viewpoint 1.1 Stylistics as an interdiscipline 1.2 The chapter-by-chapter progression of this book. 1.3 A digression on literariness 1.4 A list of texts examined Notes 2. Linguistics and the figures of rhetoric 2.1 Introduction 2.2 A linguistic perspective on literary language 2.3 Figures of speech as deviant or foregrounded phenomena in language 2.4 Classifying figures of speech 2.5 Linguistic analysis and critical appreciation Notes 3. 'This Bread I Break' - language and interpretation 3.1 Cohesion in a text 3.2 Foregrounding 3.3 Cohesion of foregrounding 3.4 Implications of context 3.5 Conclusion: interpretation Notes 4. Literary criticism and linguistic description 4.1 The nature of critical statements 4.2 The nature of linguistic statements 4.3 The relation between critical and linguistic statements 4.4 Leavis on Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale' 4.5 Linguistic support for Leavis's account 4.6 Conclusion Notes5. Stylistics 5.1 Introduction 5.2 The text: 'Ode to the West Wind' by Percy B. Shelley 5.3