Drawing on recent psychological research, this book proposes a new and clear definition of "style" and provides a systematic theoretical account of style in relation to cognitive and affective science. Patrick Hogan uses rich examples from literature, film, and graphic fiction to explain the narrative, thematic, and emotional functions of style in narrative.

Patrick Colm Hogan is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor in the English Department and the Cognitive Science Program at the University of Connecticut. Hogan is the author of twenty-four books and over 200 articles and book chapters, as well as the editor or co-editor of five books, six special issues of journals, and the web-based Literary Universals Project. His research combines cognitive and affective science with narrative theory to address problems in literary aesthetics and politics.

• Introduction. Cognitive and Affective Stylistics


• Part One: Literature


• I. Literary Style


• II. Story Structure: Shakespeare and the Integration of Genres


• III. Verbal Narration: Ambiguities of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying


• Part Two: Film


• IV. Film Style


• V. Perceptual Interface and Painterly Cinema: Three Minutes of Robert Rodriguez's Sin City


• VI. Emplotment: Ellipsis and Excess in Yasujiro Ozu's Postwar Films


• VII. Visual Narration: Embodiment and Point of View in Lu Chuan's Nanjing! Nanjing!


• Part Three: Graphic Narrative


• VIII. Stylistic Choices in Graphic Narrative: Particularity and Its Functions


• in Art Spiegelman's Maus


• Afterword. Keep Stylistics Great: A Note on Politics and the Analysis of Style


• Works Cited