Stylistic Deviations in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Abstract

Linguistic analysis and literary criticism had been in rival positions for decades. While a linguist, as Jakobson states, is deaf poetic language, a literary scholar is indifferent to linguistic problems. The introduction of stylistics as a common tool, then, was capable of bridging the gap between them. This study tries to bring linguistics and literature under the umbrella of stylistics. It aims to analyze the stylistic deviations in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” based on five stylistic levels, namely phonological, graphological, lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels. The results show the potentials of stylistic approach to solve the difficulty of foregrounded language. They also show the richness of stylistic deviations in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” which moves the readers’ interest to read the poem impatiently. The study is descriptive and qualitative