Stylistics is the study of style used in literary language and the effect the writer wishes to communicate to the reader. It attempts to establish principles capable of explaining the production and reception of meaning, literary criticism, and critical discourse analysis. Stylistics applies linguistics to literature in the hope of arriving at analyses which are more broadly based, rigorous and objective. The pioneers were the Prague and Russian schools but their approaches have been appropriated and extended in recent years by radical theory. Stylistics can be evaluative (i. e. judge the literary worth on stylistic criteria), but more commonly attempts to simply analyze and describe the workings of texts which have already been selected as noteworthy on other grounds.
