Linguistics and Literary Studies

Interdisciplinarity has gained increasing prominence as a general guiding principle for innovative research over the past decades. However, few works have attempted to provide a comprehensive survey of the phenomenon from the specific vantage point of literary and cultural studies. The handbook aims to fill this lacuna. It explores interdisciplinarity in the fields of contemporary literary and cultural scholarship and provides a guide to key debates on (current) forms, theories, and practices of interdisciplinarity. This chapter focuses on the relationship between linguistics and literary studies. It specifically argues for the intersection of the two disciplines, in the development of stylistics, a field of study that uses methodologies and analytical methods from linguistics to examine language patterns and their interpretative effects in literary texts. Having set out the basic parameters of stylistics, I exemplify the discipline through an analysis of a poem written about the Covid-19 pandemic together with some reader response data generated through reading group discussion. The chapter ends with an evaluation of my approach and of stylistics as a form of literary analysis more generally.