The year’s work in stylistics 2020

Abstract

When I signed off the previous ‘Year’s work’ article I naively looked forward to a year ahead of restored travel to international conferences and other trappings of the ‘old normal’. Instead it has been another year of Zooming here and Teaming there and e-books and e-learning. All of this has brought such disruption and steep learning curves that, even amongst the few positives which academics may have found in our ongoing lockdown lives, we could be forgiven for not producing any new work at all. Not so stylisticians. To Simpson’s (2014: 4) three ‘Rs’, we can now add ‘resilience’, for stylisticians seem to have responded to the crisis of the pandemic by continuing to produce work of incredible breadth and depth. To paraphrase the epigraph from Bram Stoker, it is really wonderful how much resilience there is in stylistics. The same resilience cannot be necessarily attributed to me, so I wish to bring forward the disclaimer that often comes at the end of the ‘Year’s work’ that it is not possible to acknowledge all of the work produced in stylistics in a single year in a single article. Trying to be as comprehensive as possible has been complicated by the conditions of lockdown, for example where ‘remote access’ has not been granted or where publishers refuse steadfastly to stray from the new e-book obsession. Nonetheless the article aims to be a fairly thorough snapshot, if there is such a thing, into the resilient and unfaltering stylistics of 2020. As always, articles published in Language and Literature are not included in the references section to protect the impact factor of the journal but they are given with relevant volume and issue numbers so that readers can locate them. The sections into which the article is organised are not necessarily intended to indicate definitive