Language in Literature: Style and Foregrounding

Book Details

• Author: Geoffrey Leech

• Edition: First Edition

• Binding: Paperback

• Number of Pages: 234

• Release Date: 15-08-2008

• EAN: 9781032031071

• Package Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches

• Languages: English

• Country of Origin: India

Description:
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 entire volume shows a continuity of approach across a period when literary and linguistic studies have often 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 counters the ‘flight from the text’ that has characterized thinking about language and literature in the last thirty years. In this period, the response of the reader has been given undue prominence over the characteristics and meaning potential of the text itself.

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.