The year’s work in stylistics 2021

Abstract

Last year in his final ‘Year’s Work’ as Reviews Editor, Simon Statham wrote about the effect that coronavirus and lockdown had had on the way we engaged with our working lives. In the article, Simon reflected on how he had been somewhat naı̈ve when, in ‘The Year’s Work’ for 2019, he signed off by looking forward to a year of travel and international conferences as the world returned to pre-Covid ‘normal’. In his reflections of the year prior, Simon made a case for extending Simpson’s (2014: 4) ‘three Rs’ of stylistics to include ‘resilience’, to reflect the varied ways stylisticians around the world had adapted to working in the Covid landscape. Of course, what Simon was not to know when he wrote ‘The Year’s Work in Stylistics 2019’was how long Covid would affect our lives. As I retrospectively write this ‘Year’s Work’ for 2021 in 2022, it is still the case that Covid is affecting our working lives; however, arguably the new ways we have developed for staying connected in a socially disconnected world are now bringing new benefits as virtual interaction is no longer a deviation from the academic norm. An example of this is the many ways that colleagues from around the world are able to attend conferences which would be unfeasible for them to attend in person, and how virtual meetings have fostered collaboration between researchers internationally. The international travel that Simon hoped for in 2020 has returned for many of us and conference organisers have welcomed delegates in person and virtually as they embrace the hybrid conference format. The stylistics world is opening back up and testimony to this is the fact that PALAwas able to hold its first face-to-face conference since 2019 in Liverpool. The conference, ‘Style and Senses’, hosted in the beautiful city of Aix (and organised by academics at Aix-Marseille University and University Paul Valéry – Montpellier 3), was a welcome opportunity for many stylisticians to reengage in the lively discussion the conference format allows. Another key event in the stylistics calendar was the one-day ‘Applied Stylistics