Book Review

Lesley Jeffries’s Critical Stylistics: The Power of English is concerned with the power of English text and talk—indeed primarily with text as the bulk of examples in the book suggest. The author draws on a wide array of examples covering newspaper, corporate, political and legal registers as well as conventional language use and even invented examples in order to explicate the construction of ideological content in different types of text. The book is intended for an audience of students and beginning critical stylistics analysts and aims to provide them with “specific tools of analysis to get a clear sense of how texts may influence the ideological outlook of their recipients” (p. 6, [original emphasis]). Jeffries argues that ideological content, innocent as well as manipulative, is threaded through linguistic structure and in this book she offers her audience a set of analytical tools to help them discover where ideology lies. She is quick to warn, however, that this is not a quick guide to textual ideology and acknowledges the role of background schemata in informing the impact of the text on the reader.