Principles of … stylistics: The central place of IA Richards’ <i>principles of literary criticism</i> in a theory of stylistics

This article argues that IA Richards’ Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) brings to light several key challenges in contemporary stylistics while pointing to their possible solutions. After introducing the scope and ambition of Richards’ book, the article examines a set of interrelated issues. The first is Richards’ ambivalent attitude to imagery, evidencing the challenges that this phenomenon poses to any systematic account of literary experience. In particular, the variability of responses associated with imagery appears at odds with the scientific need to find regularities in the responses themselves. The second issue is the troubled route between stimulus and response, which characterises not just imagery but extends to the whole of literary effects. In the spirit of Richards, the article regards such non-linearity as uncharted complexity rather than randomness, emphasising the influence of a mediating factor: namely, context itself. The article offers some initial thoughts on how to model context by exploring the testability of some feature-effect claims, including claims made by Richards himself. The issue of testability thus paves the way for an exploration of Richards’ empirical side, particularly his observations on the tension between the richness of literary experience and the simplifications imposed by experimental methods – a tension that reflects the diverging aims of the two disciplines underpinning Richards’ work: literary criticism and psychology. The article concludes by showing how Principles of Literary Criticism can help us better theorise literary effects. This is done first by focusing on Richards’ critique of the fallacy of projection , whereby the effects triggered by a work of art are erroneously re-conceptualised as the work’s inherent qualities; and, second, by reappraising Richards’ diagram representing the experience of reading a poem. I suggest that the stages of the diagram – sensations, imagery (tied vs free), reference, emotions and attitudes – grow increasingly autonomous from the stimulus (the poem), thereby cueing a parallel increase in subjective appropriation and depth of processing. In addressing these issues, the article brings to the fore the lasting legacy of Richards’ ‘thinking machine’ – as he unassumingly but fittingly called his masterpiece.