Narrative Progression in the Short Story: A corpus stylistic approach

Toolan, Michael

ISBN 10: 9027233438 / ISBN 13: 9789027233431

Published by John Benjamins Publishing, Amsterdam, 2010

About this Item

First printing of this 8vo paperback edition - volume 6 in the Linguistic Approaches to Literature series. Pp x + 212. A clean, unmarked copy in printed wrappers. Lightly pencilled notes on the inside of the lower wrapper.

Seller Inventory # 99787

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Narrative Progression in the Short Story: A corpus stylistic approach
• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing, Amsterdam
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9027233438
• ISBN 13: 9789027233431
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: First printing of this edition.
• Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literary Criticism

About this title

Synopsis

One of our most valuable capacities is our ability partly to predict what will come next in a text. But linguistic understanding of this remains very limited, especially in genres such as the short story where there is a staging of the clash between predictability and unpredictability. This book proposes that a matrix of narrativity-furthering textual features is crucial to the reader’s forming of expectations about how a literary story will continue to its close. Toolan uses corpus linguistic software and methods, and stylistic and narratological theory, in the course of delineating the matrix of eight parameters that he sees as crucial to creating narrative progression and expectation. The book will be of interest to stylisticians, narratologists, corpus linguists, and short story scholars.