Josephine M. Guy

Literary stylistics, authorial intention and the scientific study of literature: A critical overview

A tendency by literary stylisticians to overlook the role of the author in the generation of literary meaning has been a significant source of tension between linguistic approaches to literariness and other practices in the discipline, such as text-editing and literary biography. Recently, however, efforts have been made to close this gap, with a branch of stylistics, cognitive poetics, claiming to have developed a new and empirical method of integrating an appreciation of authorial imagination and creativity into the study of readers’ responses to the language of literary texts. We examine these claims critically, testing the grounds of assertions about scientific rigour in relation to demands about model testing and falsifiability associated with the scientific study of literature more generally. We then explore how some other methodologies, technologies and insights associated with this last branch of the discipline might be brought to bear on the topic of authorial intention, with the aim of determining whether, and in what ways, our understanding of authorial intention, and its role in literary processing, might be furthered through empirical enquiry.

‘The Chimneyed City’: Imagining the North in Victorian Literature

The best-known mid-nineteenth-century literary depictions of the north of England, and more specifically of the industrial North, which at the time was most closely identified with the south-eastern part of Manchester and neighbouring areas of Cheshire, are to be found in the subgenre of social-problem or industrial novels. This group of works includes Frances Trollope’s Michael Armstrong, The Factory Boy (1839), set in the fictional town of Ashleigh and based on Trollope’s fact-finding visit to Manchester, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood (1841), which centres on the industrial town of ‘M.’, Elizabeth Stone’s William Langshawe, The Cotton Lord (1842), based on the murder by striking workers in 1831 of the young mill-owner Thomas Ashton, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, subtitled ‘A Tale of Manchester Life’ (1848), and her North and South (1854–55), which takes place mainly in ‘Milton-Northern’ in the evocatively named ‘Darkshire’, Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), Disraeli’s ‘Young England’ trilogy (especially Sybil (1845)) and Geraldine Jewsbury’s Marian Withers (1851) which was first published in the Manchester Examiner and Times.1