Blurb:

Provides a selective overview of the chiefly mainstream discipline of stylistics today and points up connections to and divergences from SFL’s – and in particular Halliday and Hasan’s – ways of thinking. Topics engaged with comprise stylistics’ ever-burgeoning tool kit, its diverse notions of style, the myriad sub-disciplines that have emerged and the distinction between views on what it is that the discipline studies. The chapter also goes back in time with the aim of tracking down and describing some of the most important historical roots of systemic functional stylistics, to The Moscow and Prague Circles and the scholars that bequeathed a considerable, and crucial, part of the present-day DNA of both SFL and mainstream stylistics. Relevant later twentieth century developments in the field are also reviewed.