Corpus Stylistics and Dickens’s Fiction

For researchers and students of English language and literature, Mahlberg (English language and applied linguistics, U. of Nottingham, UK) demonstrates how corpus linguistic methods can be combined with literary analysis to study electronic versions of texts by Charles Dickens. She focuses on linguistic patterns in specific novels and across texts, looking at clusters or repeated sequences of words as building blocks and their functions in contributing to descriptions of areas of meaning in textual worlds. She outlines the use of corpus linguistics with literary stylistics, introduces the concept of the corpus stylistic circle to explain the relationship between linguistic analysis and literary appreciation, and provides a theoretical context for the process of characterization, particularly the creation of memorable characters in his fiction, and how clusters can be interpreted as building the foundation of a fictional world. She explains why five-word clusters can be used in the identification of local textual functions, the use of lexical bundles, the surface features of clusters, a classification of clusters found in the texts of Dickens and other authors, and clusters in terms of character speech, body language, narrator comments, and labels. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Michaela Mahlberg is Associate Professor in English Language and Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham, UK.