Max Bluestone. From Story to Stage: The Dramatic Adaptation of Prose Fiction in the Period of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. (Studies in English Literature, 70.) The Hague-Paris: Mouton, 1974. 341 pp. Dfl.52.

This Companion provides an introduction to the craft of prose. It considers the technical aspects of style that contribute to the art of prose, examining the constituent parts of prose through a widening lens, from the smallest details of punctuation and wording to style more broadly conceived. The book is concerned not only with prose fiction but with creative non-fiction, a growing area of interest for readers and aspiring writers. Written by internationally-renowned critics, novelists and biographers, the essays provide readers and writers with ways of understanding the workings of prose. They are exemplary of good critical practice, pleasurable reading for their own sake, and both informative and inspirational for practising writers. The Cambridge Companion to Prose will serve as a key resource for students of English literature and of creative writing.

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The discipline of English Literature from the perspective of SFL register

Language Context and Text ◽

10.1075/langct.00005.hui ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

pp. 102-120

Author(s):

Rosemary Huisman

Keyword(s):

Literary Criticism ◽

Systemic Functional Linguistics ◽

English Literature ◽

Special Focus ◽

English Poetry ◽

Prose Fiction ◽

First Order ◽

Disciplinary Process ◽

Historical Periods ◽

Australian Universities

AbstractThe paper first traces the history and elaboration of the tertiary discipline English Literature through the 19th and 20th centuries to the present day, with special focus on the axiology, the values, given to the discipline and with a brief account of literary criticism and literary theory. It then refers to the work on registerial cartography in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and explores the register of the contemporary discipline in first-order field of activity and second-order field of experience, with examples from the language of webpages and exam papers of Australian universities. It continues with a brief overview of the author’s own work using SFL in the study ofthe poeticandthe narrativein English poetry and prose fiction of different historical periods and concludes with a caveat on the central disciplinary process, that of interpretation.

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