A fruitful, well-established development in literary studies has been the application of ideas drawn from linguistics. Linguistic Criticism introduces the reader to the benefits of applying precise analytical methods to the criticism of text, thereby enriching the experience of language in all its modes.

Here Roger Fowler, one of the subject's most experienced practitioners, sets out clearly and simply a variety of analytical techniques which he demonstrates through the discussion of a wide range of texts drawn from fiction, poetry, and drama. He concentrates on structures which relate literature to ordinary language, stressing the importance of the reader's everyday language skills.

This completely rewritten second edition includes clarified and expanded sections dealing with the role of the reader in literary criticism, and with social meanings of language, and includes more twentieth-century texts and examples for analysis and discussion.