The year’s work in stylistics 2008

Abstract

This is my fifth and final review of the year's work in stylistics. From summer 2009, I will be stepping down as Reviews Editor of Language and Literature and taking up my new position as Assistant Editor of the journal. It seems appropriate, therefore, that this year's survey of publications in stylistics be placed within a broader context; 'The Year's Work in Stylistics 2008' will be informed by a wider consideration of the years' work since 2003. Over the coming pages, I will, as usual, identify and discuss some of the key research to have been produced in (and on the outskirts of) stylistics in a 12-month period. I will also attempt to position this research within a number of significant wider trends in the discipline, which I have witnessed in development over my six years as Reviews Editor. Cognitive cartographiesUndoubtedly the most rapid expansion of any field of stylistic enquiry in the last five years has taken place in the cognitive sector of the discipline. In my first review of the year's work in stylistics, co-authored with Geoff Hall in 2003, it was noted that cognitive approaches to literary-linguistics were at that point in the midst of a 'settling in' process. In the subsequent period, it is clear that cognitivism has well and truly secured its feet under the table of stylistics, so much so that many academics now making habitual use of cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology in their stylistic analyses probably would not classify themselves primarily as 'cognitivists' at all. The centrality of cognitive approaches within stylistics and linguistics more broadly is evidenced in the ease and regularity with which so many researchers from diverse academic backgrounds now make use of its structures and frameworks to aid their core investigative aims. These investigative aims may originate anywhere from Critical Discourse Analysis to literary criticism, but their disciplinary underpinnings are no longer seen to be threatened or undermined by the advent of cognition, rather secured and augmented.Conceptual metaphor continued to form one of the chief preoccupations of both card-carrying and casual cognitivists alike in 2008. Elena Semino's Metaphor in Discourse (Semino, 2008), for example, identifies and analyses a wide range of metaphors across four core domains: literature, politics, science and education. The diverse textual examples which form the focus of the core chapters of Semino's text include Elizabeth Jennings' poem 'Answers', a political cartoon by the Guardian's Steve Bell, and an extract from an online revision guide for GCSE Biology from the BBC. Semino also provides two additional case-studies in the