Impenetrable Eyes, Stealth and Surveillance: A Corpus Stylistic Study of Salient Adjectives in William Faulkner’s The Hamlet

Abstract

Stylistics combines both a granular and global approach to works of literature. Through analysis of linguistic and semantic patterns in a text, stylistics explores how authors construct a fictional text world and populate it with vividly realized characters. In this article, I adopt a corpus-stylistic approach to William Faulkner’s The Hamlet. Through identification of high-frequency words and close reading of their concordances, I explore what the data reveals about Faulkner’s thematic concerns in the novel and how his linguistic strategies convey them to the reader.