Investigating Dickens' Style

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.

'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

Autorentext
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.

Inhalt
Acknowledgements Abbreviations Foreword; J.E.Joseph PART ONE: INTRODUCTION - THEORETICAL BACKGROUND A Short History of the Study of Collocation Collocation in Literary Language Chronological Change of Collocation Collocation in Dickens Definition of Collocation Corpus Data and Software Outline of the Book PART TWO: COLLOCATION IN DICKENS Familiar Collocations Creative Collocations Collocations and First Citations from Dickens in the OED PART THREE: CASE STUDY - COLLOCATIONS IN BLEAK HOUSE Highest-Frequency Content-Words and their Collocations in Bleak House and the Dickens Corpus Comparison of Usual Collocations between Esther's and the Third-Person Non-dialogues Usual Collocations Peculiar to Esther's Non-dialogue Usual Collocations Peculiar to the Third-Person Non-dialogue Unusual Collocations of Esther's Narrative and the Third-person Narrative Conclusion Collocations and Characters Mind Styles of the First-Person Narrators in Terms of Collocations: Esther, David and Pip New Compound Words as Collocation Appendices 1-5 Bibliography Index of Names and Subjects Index of Words and Collocations in Dickens