In this book, Yufang Ho compares the text style difference between the two versions of John Fowles' The Magus, exemplifying the methodological principles and analytic practices of the corpus stylistic approach.
The Magus was first published in 1966 and was revised and republished by Fowles in 1977. Fowles' own comment on the second edition was that it was 'rather more than a stylistic revision.' The book explores how the revised version is linguistically different from the original, especially in terms of point of view (re) representation. The corpus stylistic approach adopted combines qualitative and quantitative comparison to confirm the overall text style difference. The analysis demonstrates that computer assisted methods can identify significant linguistic features which literary critics have not noticed and provide a more detailed descriptive basis for literary interpretation of (either edition) of the novel. This analysis of The Magus serves as a case study and exemplar of how corpus techniques may be used generally in the study of linguistics.
Dr Yufang Ho is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, Tzu Chi University, Taiwan
Daniel McIntyre is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Uppsala University, Sweden.
Brian Walker is a Visiting Researcher at Queen's University Belfast, UK. His research interests are in stylistics, discourse analysis, and corpus linguistics, especially applied to literary and political discourses. He has co-authored books on discourse analysis (Canning and Walker 2024), stylistics (Lugea and Walker 2023), corpus stylistics (McIntyre and Walker 2019) and socio-political keywords (Jeffries and Walker 2017). His other published research focuses on using corpus linguistic approaches to analyse poetry (McIntyre and Walker 2022), discourses of austerity (Jeffries and Walker 2019, 2020), and Early Modern English news pamphlets (Walker and McIntyre 2015).