Ezra Pound called Ulysses ‘a triumph in form’. In contrast, Holbrook Jackson deplored it as ‘chaos’, referring to ‘the arrangement of the book’ as ‘the greatest affront of all’. T. S. Eliot justified the ‘formlessness’ of Ulysses as a reflection of Joyce’s dissatisfaction with the novel form. Taking such comments as a springboard, this chapter attends to Ulysses’s capacity to produce pronounced effects of both form and formlessness, arguing that its longstanding position at the apex of the modernist canon is connected to this artful duality. Through its extensive intertextuality and practice of a gamut of generic forms, Joyce’s shape-shifting book invites its own critical insertion into ‘the tradition’. Simultaneously, it resists full absorption into any singular critical scheme through its flouting of expectations of stylistic unity and narrative closure. Ulysses achieves that exquisite balancing of pattern and disorder, or novelty and familiarity, that maximizes a work’s chance of being rated as ‘high art’. Yet its recognition as such was also considerably aided by the interpretations formulated by Joyce and his champions in the early days of the book’s reception.

What is Chinese hip-hop? How is its authenticity negotiated and contested in China? Instead of seeing Chinese hip-hop as a given cultural form that follows a singular trajectory, this chapter conceptualizes it as a precarious cultural formation suspended by competing claims to authenticity and overdetermined by divergent forces, such as the hip-hop communities, the state, and commercial forces. The broadcast of The Rap of China in 2017 was a decisive moment in the massification of hip-hop in China, in which the subcultural genre was domesticated, commercialized, and re-infused with hegemonic ideology. Focusing on the televisual remediation of hip-hop in China, this chapter illuminates how battles for authenticity have been fought out among different actors or groups, how tensions between the ethos and the techne of hip-hop unfold, and how censorship and propaganda imperatives delimit the contours of the genre’s representation to the mass audience. It problematizes the line between “the underground” and the mainstream, while foregrounding the process in which different horizons of hip-hip negotiate with one another, co-shaping what is visible, audible, and commendable. The issues discussed in this chapter will likely remain central to the development and dilemma of Chinese hip–hop in the years to come.

The chapter begins by exploring ways of working with machine-generated or machine-stored texts. Texts produced with the aid of machine translation (MT) or with the aid of translation memories (TM) can enhance productivity, but almost without exception require significant editing. In the case of MT this usually takes place at the end of the process, in the case of TM typically during the process itself. The distinction between editing and revision is reinforced through an exercise illustrating and inviting practice of the two activities using newspaper articles. Next, the chapter explores translators’ potential uses of the internet for individual or group collaborative translation, and their varying attitudes to this type of collaboration. Finally, it introduces and illustrates an approach to translation analysis known as translational stylistics

In this chapter we will disco≠≠≠ver that language variation is a normal characteristic of speech on all language levels: in the sounds of accents, words, in grammar but also in discourse. When speaking, we always face alternative choices, and these are determined by our regional and social backgrounds and by the context of situation. We will discuss the concept of the sociolinguistic variable in more detail and find that variation is rule-conditioned and systematic. We focus on all actors and factors involved: the social dimension of variation (individuals, groups, communities) and its social correlates (region, class, gender, ethnicity, education). Last but not least, we will look at the spread of innovative features and trace patterns of diffusion from individual speakers, the point of origin of change, throughout wider society (via processes such as actuation, diffusion, and embedding).

Chapter II reconstructs the complex frame narrative underlying The Lord of the Rings, according to which Tolkien came into possession of an old book, which allegedly included stories from an ancient past of the world and was written by three authors of Hobbit race; the book was soon supplemented by a large bulk of miscellaneous material, and was later heavily edited, through a process whose last stage was Tolkien’s own compilation and translation. The second part investigates the theoretical implications of this meta-textual frame. Some of these are related to Tolkien’s mythopoetic ambition and urgency for narrative ‘realism’; others reflect important aspects of the literary fabric of the novel, including its Hobbito-centrism, as regards both focalisation and themes. More deeply, the meta-textual frame allows Tolkien to express and self-reflect on his own experience as a writer, who perceived his stories as something ‘other’ from him, ‘given’ or ‘discovered’, and free from the control of his rational mind.

Shelley was a prolific and varied writer of correspondence throughout his short life. The work of collecting, editing, and annotating Shelley’s letters has been going on since the 1840s, but large portions of his early and Italian correspondence remain lost. The essay discusses this corpus and its critical history before examining three types of letters that Shelley was particularly adept at writing. Shelley’s adversarial letters to older men such as his father show his mastery of a radical bombast; correspondence with contemporaries such as Hogg and Hitchener shows him harnessing the form for the debate of ideas; and his long descriptive epistles about Italy, addressed to his friend Peacock, constitute some of the finest travel writing in English. T. S. Eliot was quite wrong to claim Shelley’s letters are ‘insufferably dull’: this essay begins to think about the elements of their content and style that reveal their literary achievement.

Copyeditors and proofreaders are some of the heaviest users of dictionaries, consulting them regularly in the course of their work, though little has been written on the influence of dictionaries on editors or of editors on dictionaries. Editors consult dictionaries on matters of spelling, capitalization, compounding, meaning, end-of-line hyphenation, and more. They may also disallow new forms or senses not found in a dictionary. Further, style manuals typically dictate not only which dictionary to use but how to use it, particularly on matters of spelling variants. Dictionaries thus become prescriptive tools in the hands of editors, despite lexicographers’ descriptive approach. There may also be something of a feedback loop between editors and lexicographers: because editors are gatekeepers of publishing, they have an outsized influence on what appears in print and thus what is recorded in dictionaries and therefore regarded as correct. Through dictionaries, copyeditors may therefore play an underappreciated and largely unexplored role in shaping standard English.

This chapter examines the concept of style in terms of language and of representation. The style of a poem may first be understood as a problem of language at the level of the sentence. The analysis of style is then concerned with diction, syntax, meter, and other such linguistic features, and analysis can approach style as either a conscious choice or an unconscious reflex. But style is therefore also a problem of representation. For example, style may index the poet's character, gender, class, or any other aspect of their identity, and in this way, style is entangled in the specificities of social and historical life. Through detailed readings of poems by Margaret Cavendish and Harryette Mullen, the chapter then argues that the concept of style, both as language and representation, mediates between the one poem and the many. On the one hand, style customarily links one poem to other poems and indeed to other discourses and artforms. On the other, precisely because styles are shared and repeated a given poem may allude to or incorporate styles as part of its material and may, through this very process, affirm its own difference or even singularity.

Advanced writing skills can make a piece of content truly excellent. Such tricks of the wordsmith’s trade include specialist structures, ensuring your content is inclusive and appealing to all, elegantly laid out, and efficiently edited.

This chapter is intended to invite composers at an earlier stage in their career to think about what their unique musical voice is, and how that might be influenced by the art and ideas existing around them. It concludes with some practical advice to help inspire composers to develop an understanding of what is most special about their musical instinct, imagination, and creativity.

This introduction briefly explores the relationship between compositional choice and stylistic expectation or ideology. With new music now a plethora of styles and approaches, how might we understand work that’s happening currently in the context of historical and social influence?

Since the eighteenth century, Swift’s prose has been admired for its simplicity and clarity. This chapter pays attention to how the ‘purity’ of Swift’s prose style interconnects with the coarseness and grotesquery of his writing. Swift, this chapter argues, was part of a reaction that emerged in the late seventeenth century against the Elizabethan writers and their ornate metaphysical style. The level of details that he imported into his prose fictions opened up new visual possibilities, both for narrative and for disgust. His microscopic eye collides with his scatological vision.

Thomas Mann’s literary obsession with Nietzsche’ philosophy was lifelong, continuously evolving, and constantly subversive. His early short stories were preoccupied with Nietzsche’s Wagner reception and cultural critique of decadence; the middle-period novella, “Death in Venice” engaged with the mythical pair of the Dionysian and Apollonian; the novel Doktor Faustus, his self-proclaimed “Nietzsche book,” combined Nietzsche’s biography, aesthetics, and “the problem of the German.” In each phase, Mann’s reception was never simply dutiful, but rather mischievously pitted one Nietzschean position against another, deriving dramatic force from the often contradictory capaciousness of his thought. This chapter focuses on a work not always considered as part of Mann’s Nietzsche reception: Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, an early short story later expanded to become Mann’s last novel. The text playfully juxtaposes Nietzsche’s “problem of the actor” and his ideal of self-fashioning, what Alexander Nehamas describes as Nietzsche’s “life as literature.” It explores issues of style, taste, parody, “gay science,” and the concerns attendant upon the translation of Nietzsche’s literary philosophy back into literature proper. It shows how the parody and mockery of Nietzschean ideals cannot help but fall in with the models they turn on, and the implications for our understanding of Nietzsche’s own writing.

Whereas references to Heraclitus’ doctrine of universal flux are abundant in Nietzsche’s works, remarks about Heraclitus’ style are few and appear to be limited to the early works. One striking assessment, given Heraclitus’ reputation of obscurity, features in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks: “Hardly anyone has ever written with as lucid and luminous a quality”. The chapter aims at clarifying the relationship between Heraclitus’ fragments, most of which can be described as “aphorisms,” and Nietzsche’s pronouncements about the aphoristic style he himself practices, and at showing why Nietzsche’s systematic reconstruction of Heraclitus’ doctrine takes the form of a cento, a literary form where originally disjoint Heraclitean aphorisms are brought together in a doxographic recomposition that makes of Heraclitus, at the cost of some important tweakings, the tragic, Dionysian philosopher he never ceased to be in Nietzsche’s eyes – as clear and as obscure as Nietzsche himself.

This chapter reviews the study of variation in gesture and its theoretical underpinnings in the field of gesture studies. It questions the use of culture, language, or nationality as the default unit of analysis in studies of gesture variation. Drawing on theoretical developments in sociolinguistics and recent anthropologial analyses of gesture, it argues for the possibility that social factors and divisions other than linguistic/cultural boundaries may provide a more robust and comprehensive theoretical account for variation in gesture.

This introductory chapter provides the rationale for the book, as well as its organization. As part of the linguistic landscape, public signage provides glimpses of a culture and its changes. The ability to read signs is a practical skill essential for daily survival in the target language environment. But there seems to have been a general neglect of signs in the typical Chinese language curriculum, even at advanced levels of instruction. This book aims to rectify the situation.