DONALD ROSS
210L Lind Hall, (612) 625-5585
rossj001@tc.umn.edu
Department of English, University of Minnesota


"Stylistics and the Testing of Literary Hypotheses," Poetics, 7 (1978), 389-416.


The approach to style which informs this study follows the broadly-outlined suggestions of Enkvist, "the style of a text is a function of the aggregate of the ratios between the frequencies of its phonological, grammatical and lexical items, and the frequencies of the corresponding items in a contextually related norm." The paper includes three separate studies. The first concludes that, among Romantic poems, there is a great deal of similarity between poems by Keats's odes and sonnets and Coleridge's "conversation poems," in contrast to those of other poems from the era. The second examines Wordsworth's 1815 Preface to distinguish stylistically between Romantic poems which are lyrics, and others which are "idyls." The final study shows the differences in styles between Keats's sonnets and a sample of sonnets by five Elizabethan poets.

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Last revised 15 November 1999

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