MACMILLAN Investigating Dickens' Style: A Collocational Analysis

Product Description This new, corpus-driven approach to the study of language and style of literary texts makes use of the Dickens' 4.6 million-word corpus for a detailed examination of patterns of lexical collocations. It offers new insights into Dickens' linguistic innovation, together with a nuanced understanding of his use of language to achieve stylistic ends. At the centre of the study is a close analysis of the two narratives in Bleak House , read as a focal point for consideration of Dickens' stylistic development through his whole writing life. Review 'Combining quantitative computer-generated evidence with discriminating analysis, Hori offers many new insights into Dickens's style. Comparisons with other novelists enable him to establish incontrovertible claims for Dickens's distinctiveness, even as comparisons between Dickens's own works, and between the two narratives of Bleak House, provide fascinating results. This is a pioneering book in stylistic analysis, and a valuable contribution to the study of Dickens.' - Paul Schlicke, President of the International Dickens Fellowship 'This well-documented book ofers a thorough, fresh outlook on the much-discusses question of Dickens's style.' - Cercles About the Author MASAHIRO HORI is Professor of English Linguistics and Stylistics at Kumamoto Gakuen University in Japan. He co-authored a series of books, My Word, with Gerald Sullivan, and co-translated Tobias Smollett's The Adventures of Roderick Random in Japanese.