Early Twentieth Century
The analysis of literary style goes back to Classical rhetoric, but modern stylistics has its roots in Russian Formalism, and the related Prague School, in the early twentieth century.
In 1909, Charles Bally's Traité de stylistique française had proposed stylistics as a distinct academic discipline to complement Saussurean linguistics. For Bally, Saussure's linguistics by itself couldn't fully describe the language of personal expression. Bally's programme fitted well with the aims of the Prague School.
Building on the ideas of the Russian Formalists, the Prague School developed the concept of foregrounding, whereby poetic language stands out from the background of non-literary language by means of deviation (from the norms of everyday language) or parallelism. According to the Prague School, the background language isn't fixed, and the relationship between poetic and everyday language is always shifting.
Read more about this topic: Stylistics (literature)
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