Historical Background of Stylistics
When it comes to the historical view of stylistics, it can be said that stylistics is a twentieth-century invention, but its predecessor is rhetoric which is defined as “the art of speech” i.e. a means of persuasion through public speaking emerged in the fifth century BC, whose moral and ethical benefits were first extended and promoted by Isocrates . Rhetoric and poetics helped to shape stylistics . Because rhetoric has a direct link to stylistics, and because poetics lacks the theory to precisely structure drama, rhetoric is the main aim of this section. However, poetics (or poetry), in Aristotelian terms, traditionally refers to the art of drama writing (nowadays it is defined as the art of writing poems), and the one responsible for it is Aristotle. Aristotle had written extensive length of literary critical views and thoughts on and in praise of drama, preceded by negative critiques by Plato to downgrade it . There are at least two important links to stylistics in Aristotle’s work. The first link is the handling of the presentation of thought and speech which is an essential part of stylistics; and the other link is the hypothesizing of alternative (‘what if’) scenarios which will both be discussed in chapter three .
Rhetoric comes from Greek origins where language held an acknowledged capacity to affect or persuade people, to make profit of it, and to solve political and judicial conflicts over some specific issue. To a philosopher such as Plato who was against rhetoric (and poetry) considered it a tool that lacks moral or ethical subject matters because it is politically and socially dangerous, it is compared to flattery to satisfy emotional needs, and therefore, it should be subservient to philosophy .To Aristotle, rhetoric (and poetry) was considered an art that is important in philosophical debates despite agreeing with Plato’s claims on flattery, but it is not immoral or dangerous just to hear the same fact in a different linguistic form, it could be used to spread peace rather than violence .
As mentioned above, both rhetoric and poetics have links to modern stylistics. In Longinus’ critical views, On The Sublime, he mentions five sources of sublimity that link poetics to modern stylistics; the first two sources depend on the natural ability of the writer and have nothing to do with language, however, the other three sources which depend on language choices are:
‘the proper formation of the figures of thought and figures of language’,
‘noble diction’, which refers to word choices and imagery,
and the last source concerns the arrangement of words and their prominence
