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


"Differences, Genres, and Influences," Style, 11 (1977), 262-73. Reprinted in Literary Computing and Literary Criticism: Theoretical Essays on Theme and Rhetoric, ed. R. Potter (Philadelphia, Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), pp. 45-59.

A broadly-defined stylistics is the only discipline which directly treats the artistic elements of literary texts. Histories of ideas or of authors' lives are not directly related to literary art. A history of styles would involve the intensive study of the language in several literary works, although no linguistic feature has an intrinsic aesthetic merit, nor is it an index of the author's personality or the work's success. Style, in this context, involves first translating linguistic features into some "mapping" language-metrical scansion is the most familiar example. Generalization, often using statistical techniques, would be the basic information from which to make the account of how texts were written at various times. One immediate problem for such a history is to sort out those linguistic features which are dictated by the genre from those clearly attributable to the individual author. Statistical analysis of data gathered by Josephine Miles reveals a general rise in the proportion of nouns and fall in the proportion of verbs for English poetry since Chaucer's time; adjectives rise quite sharply until the eighteenth century, an era of couplets and blank verse, then decline slightly upon the return to more traditional genres. Other, less comprehensive studies seem to reveal the pervasive extent to which the choice of a genre affects an author's language.


Return to the home page

Department of English, University of Minnesota
URL: http://English.cla.umn.edu/FacultyProfiles/Ross/Abstract
Please send comments to: Donald Ross
Last revised 15 November 1999

The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer.
© Regents of the University of Minnesota, 1999.