Richard Bradford provides a definitive introductory guide to modern critical ideas on literary style and stylistics. Providing readers with a basic grasp of stylistics and literary analysis, this comprehensive and accessible guidebook examines the terminology of literary form; how literary style has evolved since the sixteenth century; the role of stylistics in twentieth-century criticism; the discipline of stylistics from classical rhetoric to post-structuralism; the relationship between literary style and its historical context; style and gender. It includes examples of poems, plays and novels from Shakespeare to the present day.