The Revolution in France of 1789 provoked a major 'pamphlet war' in Britain as writers debated what exactly had happened, why it had happened, and where events were now headed. Jane Hodson's book explores the relationship between political persuasion, literary style, and linguistic theory in this war of words, focusing on four key texts: Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, and William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. While these texts form the core of Hodson's project, she...

Linguistics and Literary History systematically explores the advantages of an inter-disciplinary approach within the broad area of English studies. It brings together stylistics, literary theory and diachronic linguistics in order to explore their interaction at various methodological, descriptive and interpretative levels. This unique combination makes this volume on historical stylistics an important work for international scholars and postgraduate students working on the interface between literary history and language change, both from corpus-based and qualitative perspectives. The...