Critical Stylistics 

    Critical stylistics is fairly a new coined branch devised by Lesley Jeffries who attempts to integrate critical stylistics from stylistics and critical discourse analysis. Jeffries thought that since stylistics has become an interdisciplinary approach, it is possible to make substantial progress to critical stylistics using theories of stylistics and critical studies. Critical Stylistics is an approach to the study of language where the majority of focus is on ideology and style. In addition to that, the subjective views of an author are also analyzed and tested against certain criteria. Critical stylistics is developed as a reaction against critical discourse analysis  (CDA) by Lesley Jeffries (2010), based on her previous works, in which she tries to describe ideology and power language. She is the first linguist who has written such an extensive account on the subject. Critical stylistics is a response to CDA by returning the text to its central position in the analysis and to move away from politically motivated nature . Because of the vagueness and the lack of analysis tools of literary studies, Jeffries relies on stylistics which provided the vocabulary needed to describe literary effects. Tools of analysis of CDA are vague because they focus on contextual features of powerful language . This does not provide a broad range of tools to explain how texts affect and persuade readers into certain ideologies .

     Critical stylistics evolved from critical linguistics and also draws on Halliday’s (1985) metafunctions of language in his approach systemic functional linguistics which is separately discussed in this chapter. Critical stylistics refers to stylistic work studying how social meanings are represented through language, this stylistic tendency is motivated by critical linguistics and CDA. It analyzes literary and non-literary texts . Jeffries provides Critical stylistics with a method of finding the ideology in texts whether one agrees with it or not, which means it is an unbiased approach. A person or an institution that hold certain norms do not consider them as bad norms, therefore, it is crucial to use a model to explore the discursive strategies that influence our thinking of issues and how we conceive them, a model that does not consider a speaker’s aim as bad. Thus, critical stylistics is the preferred approach. 

    Critical stylistics tries to investigate the structuring of ideological meaning in text. It is a text-based methodology. It is almost a mainstream text-based stylistics but with a critical end . Critical stylistics particularly makes use of the ideational metafunction of language from Halliday’s (1985) approach to detect ideology within texts because the ideational process produces a world that has values attached to it, and these values are ideological in meaning . Furthermore, systemic linguistics assumes that language in texts functions ideationally in the representation of the world and experience, therefore, texts in their ideational functioning can constitute a system of knowledge and belief. Jeffries’ approach to critical stylistics consists of ten textual-conceptual functions of texts (listed in chapter three), these functions are a combination of textual triggers and ideational function. Thus,   a text, through these functions, represents a reality and  this reality is tested against these functions, as well as the ideology behind this stated reality.