what is stylistics

Stylistics is a branch of applied linguistics that focuses on the study and interpretation of texts of all types and spoken language in regard to their linguistic and tonal style. It is the application of linguistics to the study of literature or any text. Stylistics links literary criticism to linguistics and can be applied to an understanding of literature, journalism, advertising copy, news, non-fiction, popular culture, political and religious discourse, and spoken dialects and registers. The preferred object of stylistic studies is literature, but it is not exclusively "high literature". Stylistics is a systematic way of exploring texts, looking at the language of texts and trying to explain how that language creates meaning, style, and effect. Stylistics uses the tools of formal linguistic analysis coupled with the methods of literary criticism to isolate characteristic uses and functions of language and rhetoric rather than advance normative or prescriptive rules and patterns.