Introduction

Abstract

Poems, novels, short stories, even the very sentence you are reading would not have come into existence without the medium of language. Words describe, inspire, reveal. But words also conceal — they becloud, daze, manipulate. Words create. They shape literature and, conversely, language finds in literary writing one of its most fascinating sites of innovation. Reading literature, one might say, means witnessing a kind of linguistic alchemy at work — no wonder, then, that the Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri calls writing ‘an act of magic’ (2012a: 105). Or that his compatriot Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks of the ‘magic’ of realist fiction (2012: 4). And yet: as we all know, every magician has a trick. To discover it, onlookers must not simply allow themselves to be dazzled, but rather observe and analyse — meticulously, systematically, and with appropriate technique. This is the aim of stylistics.