Questions tagged [style]
Questions related to the style of a literary work or a specific author, i.e. the way in which word choice, sentence structure, imagery, figurative devices, repetition and other aspect of language are used to achieve certain effects.
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Are the five narrators in The Fifty Year Sword more than a gimmick?
Mark Z. Danielewski's The Fifty Year Sword is told by five narrators whose parts were ostensibly collected in interviews and tightly interleaved. Quoting the first page:
Maybe because the history ...
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Are positive, parable-like vibes a noted pattern in Russian literature (at least for short stories and anecdotes)?
WARNING! The following post contains minor spoilers about the following books:
Mikhail Bulgakov - A Country Doctor's Notebook
Bonnie Jo Campbell - American Salvage
D. W. Wilson - Once your Break a ...
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Why is Len Deighton so fond of American English?
I am British and have lived in Britain my entire life. I have never heard anyone refer to an estate car as a “station wagon”. I have never heard anyone refer to a criminal as a “hood”. I have never ...
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(Why) Is there a shift in style in Toll the Hounds?
By and large, I have found the writing style in the Malazan Book of the Fallen to be consistent across the first seven novels. They were all written by Steven Erikson. However, I feel there is a ...
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How does the style of Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl" affect the way it's read?
Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl" is written in a very distinct style. The story is made up of one very long sentence, with different phrases separated by semicolons, each phrase giving a different ...
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Why does Tagore not consistently use ‘thou’ when addressing the supreme being in Gitanjali?
The large majority of poems in the English version of Tagore's Gitanjali address a supreme being. Tagore uses the pronouns "thou", "thee" and "thy" in almost all of these ...
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Use of archaic language in certain passages in Evelina
In Evelina by Frances Burney, Rev. Mr. Villars' letters to Evelina as well as Sir John Belmont's addresses to Evelina or generally his speech during their meetings are often heavy with use of archaic ...
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Writing style in Isaac Asimov's short story "Nightfall"
I just finished reading the short story "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov. For some reason, Asimov's writing style reminded me vaguely of the young adult romance novels I used to read in my teens. ...
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Poems or stories with no repeated words?
I am after a poem/story that has no repetitions in words, further, is this a type of writing style? Are there any famous examples where this is the case?
Repetition is the act of repeating or ...
Harry Rogers
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Did Maupassant adapt the style and content of his stories to the newspapers that published them?
Guy de Maupassant published his short stories and novellas in newspapers and periodicals such as Le Figaro, Gil Blas, Le Gaulois and L'Écho de Paris before they were published in book form. Le Figaro ...
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Is Williams's This Is Just to Say an imagist poem, an objectivist poem or neither?
The Wikipedia article about the short poem "This Is Just to Say" claims the text is an imagist poem without backing up that claim.
Williams contributed to the anthology Des Imagistes, published in ...
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Did James Joyce's writing style influence Ernest Hemingway?
I'm doing a comparison paper, and I think there is something in common between Joyce's and Hemingway's short story writing: concise but powerful. Is there any evidence that Hemingway's writing style ...
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What is this "flashforward" technique called?
I was reading The Elusive Samurai, a manga by Yusei Matsui, which is set in the XIV century in Japan. The author uses some kind of special "flashforward" in which the characters, mostly ...
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What features distinguish the hymnic-epic style from Standard Babylonian?
In the general introduction to Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature (third edition, CDL Press, 2005)
Benjamin R. Foster discusses the "Akkadian literary languages":
The Babylonians ...
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Why are Sidorio chapters narrated in the present tense in Tide of Terror?
Sidorio, the main antagonist of the Vampirates series, has several stand-alone scenes dotted through the second novel, Tide of Terror. Although the series as a whole is almost entirely narrated in the ...
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