The volume contains 22 revised essays by the author from the 1970s to the 1990s. The specialization that prevails today in English studies and philology in general is countered by an interdisciplinary approach to philological methodology, which can be attributed primarily to the concept of “literary linguistics.” Children's and young adult literature, pulp fiction, exile literature, Middle English and older American literature are included, as are feminist tendencies in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the role of Jewishness in more recent novels between Malamud and Philip Roth. The issues addressed range from the controversial spellings in Ormulum to metafictional text features in late Middle English narrative works to the role of language in Orwell's 1984, and from the tendency toward satire in Chaucer's prose to the “poeticity” of everyday English. Methodologically, the argumentation alternates between stylistic analysis and close reading, literary, reception, or cultural-historical classification, ideology-critical interpretation, and computer-assisted corpus linguistic text analysis. The concluding five contributions, subsumed under “Linguistics,” demonstrate an interdisciplinary range between tense and aspect issues in contrastive language comparison and an updated corpus-based case study on early modern English adjective gradation.

This book is included in DOAB.