Context, cognition, discourse, history: Peter Verdonk’s stylistics of poetry

This book is a collection of Peter Verdonk’s most important and influential articles, written over a period of approximately 30 years. All of them concentrate on the stylistics of poetry and thereby represent a longitudinal view of the stylistic treatment of this most prototypical of the literary genres. Some of the chapters in this book will be familiar to readers while others may be less so; several of the earlier chapters in particular were originally published in journals and collections that are now difficult to get hold of. This is the nature of academic publishing and one of its downsides is that the concentrated thoughts of a writer can appear diluted as his or her work is disseminated across a wide variety of books and journals, each with a different range and readership. To have these articles in one place enables the readers to appreciate the depth of scholarship that each represents and to see more clearly the interrelations between them and the development of particular lines of thought. Stylistics develops so rapidly, as theories are tested and new methodologies are developed, that it is sometimes useful to stand still for a moment and take stock of where we have come from and where we are heading. This book offers such an opportunity because it is far more than a career retrospective. It is a road map of a discipline and offers detailed descriptions and evaluations of now familiar terrain as well as valuable speculations on what awaits us in new, as yet uncharted territories....