In Principles of Literary Criticism, IA Richards articulates succinctly what is perhaps his most pointed position on the centrality of sound in poetry: 'in most cases', he writes, the sound 'is the key to the effects of poetry'. While Richards never says exactly why or how sound is so important, we can begin to understand this when we address what he says elsewhere in the book about sound. This article suggests that two interrelated points in Richards' thinking help us understand sound as the key to the effects of poetry. First, Richards understands sounds to be in-and-of-themselves empty, gaining meaning or emotional weight only when they are heard within a given context (that of the reader and of the poem). Second, he sees emotional, rather than intellectual, effects as the stuff of poetic language, and so the centrality of sound is logically contingent on a link that Richards hints at between sound and emotion. This article pursues these two points with recourse to Richards and to other, both earlier and later, theorisations of the role of sound, before illustrating Richards' position with the aid of Keats' poem 'On the Sea'.
IA Richards' critical output, especially in Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929), is often placed at the fore of an uncomplicated trajectory from New Criticism through a series of formalist approaches to literary texts, before finally being displaced by structuralism. Less routinely, Richards has been read as an early precursor to the rise of late cognitive approaches to literary theory and analysis. This article adopts the less routine approach and, where previous considerations have been more generalist, opts to assess the more particular cognitivist inclinations in Richards' work. It does so by, firstly, bringing together the main precepts and principles of modern theories of 'embodied cognition', 'image schemata', 'affordances' and 'texture' with relevant analogues in Richards' work, namely the 'experience of forms', 'muscular images', 'poise', and finally 'texture' as well as 'rhythm'. Secondly, keeping in mind this 'cognitive aesthetic' toolkit, a term adopted in reflection of Richards' broad theoretical reliance on the discipline of aesthetics in particular, it evaluates Richards' consonance with, and potential contribution to, cognitivist scholarship.
Publishers are increasingly employing sensitivity readers to assess and advise on potentially problematic content in authors’ manuscripts, either pre- or post-publication. In this article I provide an analysis of the impact of making changes to an author’s already-published manuscript, with a view to determining whether sensitivity reading actually works to reduce potential hurt and offence to readers. My case study is of Roald Dahl’s short novel for children, George’s Marvellous Medicine (1981). I compare the original version of the novel with a revised version published in 2022. I focus on answering four questions: (i) What proportion of the original text has been revised in the 2022 edition?; (ii) What are the functions of the textual revisions?; (iii) Are the revisions primarily to narration or to non-narration (e.g. dialogue)?; and (iv) Are the revisions successful in reducing potential hurt or offence to readers? To answer these questions, I begin by cataloguing the changes made to the revised text and quantifying the nature of these. I then identify eight types of revision. My results suggest that while the underlying aims of sensitivity reading may be laudable, in practice the revisions to Dahl’s manuscript do little to reduce the potential for hurt and offence. In some cases this is because the changes made to the 2022 text have been applied inconsistently. In others, it is because to remove problematic issues would necessitate altering the plot and narratological structure of the novel as opposed to making minor amendments to the language of the text.
This article argues that IA Richards' Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) brings to light several key challenges in contemporary stylistics while pointing to their possible solutions. After introducing the scope and ambition of Richards' book, the article examines a set of interrelated issues. The first is Richards' ambivalent attitude to imagery, evidencing the challenges that this phenomenon poses to any systematic account of literary experience. In particular, the variability of responses associated with imagery appears at odds with the scientific need to find regularities in the responses themselves. The second issue is the troubled route between stimulus and response, which characterises not just imagery but extends to the whole of literary effects. In the spirit of Richards, the article regards such non-linearity as uncharted complexity rather than randomness, emphasising the influence of a mediating factor: namely, context itself. The article offers some initial thoughts on how to model context by exploring the testability of some feature-effect claims, including claims made by Richards himself. The issue of testability thus paves the way for an exploration of Richards' empirical side, particularly his observations on the tension between the richness of literary experience and the simplifications imposed by experimental methods - a tension that reflects the diverging aims of the two disciplines underpinning Richards' work: literary criticism and psychology. The article concludes by showing how Principles of Literary Criticism can help us better theorise literary effects. This is done first by focusing on Richards' critique of the fallacy of projection, whereby the effects triggered by a work of art are erroneously re-conceptualised as the work's inherent qualities; and, second, by reappraising Richards' diagram representing the experience of reading a poem. I suggest that the stages of the diagram - sensations, imagery (tied vs free), reference, emotions and attitudes - grow increasingly autonomous from the stimulus (the poem), thereby cueing a parallel increase in subjective appropriation and depth of processing. In addressing these issues, the article brings to the fore the lasting legacy of Richards' 'thinking machine' - as he unassumingly but fittingly called his masterpiece.
Most existing scholarship on reader empathy is either mostly theoretical (for example, Bourget, 2023; Keen, 2007), or uses short texts in empirical settings to gauge readers’ reactions (Fernandez-Quintanilla, 2020; Koopman, 2016; Van Peer and Pander Maat, 1996). This exploratory study used a reader survey in which respondents were asked to reflect on their emotional response to a novel which they had read in the course of their normal reading. The novels mentioned in the survey could thus be categorised into those which produced high degrees of empathy in readers and novels that did not. Through analysis of these novels, a number of textual features were identified which were more common in the higher empathy novels. These features include present tense narration, asynchrony, greater use of narrated perception, and a greater proportion of all categories of represented consciousness at the most emotional part of the story.
Professor emeritus Mick Short describes the influence that I A Richards has had on his lifetime's work in Stylistics and associated areas.
IA Richards is widely recognised as a founding father in 20th-century English stylistics. A century ago, one of his most important books, Principles of Literary Criticism, was first published. The book - which deals more with poetics than hermeneutics - has remained in print ever since. On the occasion of the centenary of its initial publication, this article focuses on three key topics that Richards explored in his 1924 book: value, experience and communication. As I explain, Richards links them to each other in unique ways that might interest stylisticians today, although English stylistics has since tended to focus more on communication or experience than on value in the past few decades.
Linguistic negation has been described as a natural foregrounding device, with some researchers noting that foregrounding with negators is not always marked grammatically, but also semantically or through textual effect. However, most studies focus on the use of sentential negation (e.g., not, no), whereas other expressions of negation, such as affixal negation, remain understudied. Recent research indicates that affixal negation is used by speakers to convey a variety of opposite meanings, often in creative and subtle ways. This study is a systematic investigation of the use of negative affixes in an oppositional discourse, namely discourse on race in the USA. The dataset is a specialized corpus, The Corpus of the Non-Fictional Writings by Ta-Nehisi Coates (COCO) (468,899 words, 1996-2018). Methodologically, the study combines corpus linguistic techniques with co(n)textual discourse analysis. The results show that affixal negation in COCO, particularly with the prefixes un-, non- and anti-, is used by Coates to disrupt patterns of collocations, fixed expressions or phrases, producing either lexically or semantically deviant instances. Thus, affixal negation has a foregrounding effect and a potential to introduce evaluative clashes in a discourse. The findings, examined through the lens of linguistic creativity, indicate that Coates employs affixal negation to perform various functions: from explicit foregrounding (e.g., as attention-seeking devices) to a subtle critique of societal norms and established institutional order (e.g., renaming concepts to offer an alternative perspective on reality).
This paper explores -ly adverbs in fictional reported speech. Specifically, it combines quantitative, corpus-based perspectives to qualitative analysis to investigate the co-occurrence of -ly adverbs and reporting verbs in 225 English novels (26M words). With an evidential basis significantly larger than what was taken into account by previous research, this paper offers both an overview of the frequency of usage of -ly adverbs in fictional reported speech and a detailed investigation of the most frequent patterns of co-occurrence between these adverbs and verbs. Moreover, building on the quantitative data, we propose a classification model of -ly adverbs that shows the main functions these items enact when used with reporting verbs. Overall, this paper contributes importantly to further our understanding of the stylistic role -ly adverbs play in fictional speech presentation, shedding light on both the patterns they create and the functions they enact.
This article pursues two main research aims. First, it examines how two politicians running for president in 2016 strategically drew on stereotypical tropes of Metropolitan New Yorkers to characterize themselves as brash and argumentative 'tough guys' from New York City and North New Jersey respectively in an effort to project strength and effectiveness as leaders. Second, it tests the extent to which Donald Trump's abrasive persona was truly unique and norm-breaking upon his entrance into politics. Through comparative case studies of Trump and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie - both known for characterizing themselves as New York/New Jersey tough guys during the 2016 Republican primaries - this study examines their rhetorical styles prior to and during the 2016 primary debates. While both figures attracted attention for their impoliteness and blunt speech, only Trump successfully translated this into political success in the primaries and general election alike. While Christie's brash rhetorical use of impoliteness maintained an image closely tied to that of a New Jersey tough guy, Trump's tough-guy persona became increasingly idiomatic as his career developed from the 2000s. Moreover, Trump is found to use impoliteness strategies that are more gratuitously face-aggravating and ad hominem in nature. The data therefore confirms that Trump indeed entered politics as a more brash, offensive and norm-challenging politician even when compared to others, including those from his home region.
This paper empirically investigates how stylistic foregrounding affects narrative empathy toward unconventional characters, focusing on Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon (1959), a short story about a cognitively delayed janitor who, after a futuristic treatment, turns into a genius and then regresses to neurodivergence. Our questionnaire-based study compared readers' empathic responses to original excerpts-rich in linguistic deviations mirroring the protagonist's cognitive shifts-with responses to manipulated, stylistically neutral versions. Although we hypothesized that foregrounding would enhance empathy, quantitative data reported higher empathy scores for readers of the manipulated versions, though with no statistically significant differences between conditions. Regression analysis showed that aesthetic appreciation was the strongest predictor of state empathy. Foregrounding, conversely, emerged as a negative predictor, suggesting that salient stylistic features may distract from emotional immersion for some readers. However, collected post-reading reflections suggest that foregrounding fosters stronger emotional connections by creating more challenging emotional reactions, as readers become progressively involved in the narrator's developments and regressions that materialize in his writing style. We provide multiple interpretations of the observed effects of foregrounding in relation to personal factors and the specific literary specimen, highlighting that foregrounding can both enhance and inhibit empathy depending on reader characteristics such as language proficiency and aesthetic sensitivity. While accessibility may facilitate immediate emotional connection, stylistic complexity appears to support reflective, often more intense responses. This study highlights the multifaceted role of literary style in shaping narrative empathy and suggests the need to account for individual reader differences in future empirical research.
Language is not necessary to narrate even quite complex tales; indeed, stories can be narrated completely visually. This paper analyses Marc-Antoine Mathieu's entirely wordless -> - also known as Sens - published in 2014, to demonstrate that viewers understand this graphic novel by drawing on (1) their knowledge of story conventions; (2) their comprehension of the ways in which the medium of the graphic novel is able to narrate; (3) their embodied awareness of image schemas, specifically the SOURCE-PATH-GOAL, FORCES, and BALANCE schemas that are at the root of the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor; (4) familiarity with any other pertinent artistic texts and cultural knowledge they happen to be able to recruit. In this way, the paper aims to show the interrelation between visual communication and cognition; to contribute to the study of comics and graphic novels; and to pay tribute to Mathieu's amazing work of art.
Heidi, a quintessential Swiss fictional character, has left an enduring imprint on global culture, surpassing the confines of mere literature to become a cultural phenomenon. Our study delves into the timeless allure of Spyri's novel by examining its portrayal of spatial and emotional dimensions. Using a mixed-method approach that combines computational methods and human annotations, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between emotional content and landscape representation in Heidi, emphasizing the narrative's reverential treatment of nature's influence and reaffirming the novel's dichotomous depiction of nature versus urbanity. Our investigation also exposes, however, disparities between computational sentiment analysis and human interpretations, underscoring some of the limitations of lexicon-based sentiment analysis methods. By advocating for a holistic approach that amalgamates computational techniques with human insights, we advocate for a nuanced understanding of sentiment analysis in literary works, one that acknowledges the subtleties and complexities woven into the narrative. We call for continued exploration to refine sentiment lexicons, explore sentiment variation across diverse literary genres and cultural contexts, and delve deeper into the interplay between sentiment and fictional space.
