Journal of Language and Literature Volume 2 Number 1 2003 ISSN 1478 - 9116

Editorial

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The field of stylistics, or literary linguistics, or linguistic criticism, is so wide that its defining borders are difficult to perceive - as a glance at the Members' Interests page of the Poetics and Linguistics Association website proves. This is perhaps not surprising, given that the field comprises two long-established disciplines - linguistics and literary criticism or theory - and has as its object of study two complex domains - language and literature. Then, literary linguistics (my favoured nomenclature) is not reducible to either linguistics or literary criticism, but - if it has any value - creates a new field of its own, one that uses the tools of linguistics to further our understanding of literature, and uses the insights gained from studying literature to challenge and extend our understanding of language. The items in this issue, then, are all written by (to misquote I.A. Richards, one of the major forerunners of literary linguistics) field-workers on the peculiarly difficult border-lands of linguistics and literary criticism.

Mark Garner takes the concepts from language ecology of predictability and creativity, and shows their relevance to poetry. In a careful reading of Robert Graves's "The Cool Web", he demonstrates how the poet confirms and denies the expectations raised in the reader by the networks of association at the poem's lexical level. Jeffrey Orr uses theories of translation from Walter Benjamin and Meike Bal to develop the idea of intersemiotic translation, and then shows how photography and written text interact in Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter to produce meaning. Peter Grundy analyses the reflexive language in Hardy's Poems of 1912-1913, and suggests that Hardy's troubled state of mind at the time can be detected in the poems' word order and deixis. In the final article, John Mckenny looks at the work of Jonathan Swift, and in particular Gulliver's Travels, and argues that several ideas from contemporary linguistics are prefigured in Swift's work. Finally, Joan Hewitt reviews Simon Armitage's new collection of poems, The Universal Home Doctor, and David West reviews the new ten-volume I.A. Richards: Selected Works 1919-1938.

David West
University of Northumbria, UK

Email: d.west@northumbria.ac.uk