Stylistics and real readers

TLDR: A growing body of research within stylistics is concerned with considering how readers interpret meaning in literary texts and testing whether the assumptions and frameworks of stylistic analysis are supported by evidence from real readers.

Abstract: Stylistics has long claimed to be an empirical method of literary analysis. One aspect of this empiricism is stylistics’ commitment to studying the effect of texts on readers. Short (1996, p. 6) emphasises the reader-centred nature of stylistics, stating that researchers in the fi eld are ‘profoundly interested in the rules and procedures which we, as readers, intuitively know and apply in order to understand what we read’. In reality, however, stylisticians have tended to focus more on textual analysis than on the reader (Hall 2009, p. 331; see also Allington and Swann 2009), and generally the ‘reader’ has remained a theoretical construct, similar to the ideal reader in much literary reader-response criticism (see Culler 2002, Iser 1978, Fish 1980). However, there is a growing body of research within stylistics that is centrally interested in considering how readers fi nd meaning in literary texts and testing whether the assumptions and frameworks of stylistic analysis are supported by evidence from real readers.