This book introduces a new way of looking at how poems mean, drawing on the framework first developed in the authors book Critical Stylistics, but applied here to aesthetic more than ideological meaning. The aim is to empower readers of poetry to articulate the features of poetic language that they come across and explain to themselves and others why these features convey the meanings that they do. While this volume focuses on contemporary poets writing in English and mostly based in the UK and Ireland, the framework will work just as well for other eras poetry, as well as for other cultures and languages.
Chapter
1. Contemporary poetry and textual meaning.- Part 1: Core
Features Of Textual Meaning.
Chapter
2. Naming and Describing: people,
places and things in poems.
Chapter
3. Representing processes: actions,
states and events in poetry .
Chapter
4. Prioritising: Subordination and
information structure in poems.
Chapter
5. Representing time, space and
society: constructing the world of the poem.- Part 2: Intermittent Features
Of Textual Meaning.
Chapter
6. Equating and Contrasting: Constructing
equivalence and opposition in poems.
Chapter
7. Enumerating and
Exemplifying: Lists and open meaning in poems.
Chapter
8. Negating: Poetic
construction of what is not.
Chapter
9. Hypothesising: Possible Worlds,
hypothetical scenarios and wish fulfilment in poems.- Chapter
10. Alluding:
Implying and Assuming in poems.
Chapter
11. Presenting others speech and
thought: Multiple voices in poems.
Chapter
12. Evoking: experiencing the
poems world.- Part Three: Conclusions.
Chapter
13. Putting it all together:
Integrated analysis of poems.
Chapter
14. Textual meaning, linguistic theory
and the stylistics of poetry.
Lesley Jeffries is a retired Professor of English Language and Linguistics and an independent scholar living and working in Leeds, UK. She has published widely in stylistics, focussing on the style of contemporary poetry and ideology in news reporting and political discourse. She is also co-editor (with Dan Mcintyre) of Babel: The Language Magazine.
