Christoph Schubert and Valentin Werner (eds.), Stylistic approaches to pop culture (Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Stylistics). New York and Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2022. Pp. xi + 270. ISBN: 9780367707309.

This volume – edited by linguists Christoph Schubert and Valentin Werner – represents a multifaceted and interdisciplinarily inspiring demonstration of the wide range of pop cultural phenomena and the manifold potentials that approaches through a stylistic lens can offer in unfolding the workings and characteristics of pop cultural discourse across genres, text types and media.

The volume under review contains one introductory chapter authored by the editors, ten chapters contributed by scholars from five different countries (USA, UK, Germany, Spain and Serbia) and an afterword by Michael Toolan, renowned expert in literary stylistics and narrative analysis. The ten main chapters have been grouped into four genre-specific sections, which I am going to also adhere to in my structuring of this review. These contributions offer detailed analyses of different and various forms of media and genres stretching across five central strands of stylistics, i.e. from sociolinguistic, pragmatic, cognitive and multimodal to corpus-based/driven approaches.

Part I of this volume comprises two contributions concerned with ‘Pop fictional texts’. One of these is chapter 2 (pp. 20–38), in which Christiana Gregoriou takes a cognitive-stylistic approach to carving out the ‘most notable characteristics of crime fiction’ (p. 20). She specifically zooms in on the author-manipulator controlling interpretative effects in Peter Robinson's A Dedicated Man (1988). Her analytical access points are, for one, Emmott & Alexander's (2014) framework of foregrounding and burying of salient information, and, for another, Stockwell's (2020) schema theory. She bundles both in what could be regarded as her very own ‘detective work’ into script writers’ anticipating manipulation of readers’ inferential processes as these are presumably trying to solve the diegetic murder themselves. I wonder if Rachel Giora's (2003, 2004) extensive work on graded salience could have been an additional asset to this particular chapter and the methodological approach taken.

In chapter 3 (pp. 39–58), Rocío Montoro studies two specimens of a ‘prototypical’ pop-cultural nature (p. 39): Charlaine Harris's novel Dead until Dark (2001) and the TV series True Blood created by Alan Ball (2008–14). Montoro takes a corpus-stylistic approach to the telecinematic adaptation of Harris's novel on the basis of grammatical and lexico-semantic components. Her methodological decisions are fine-grained and transparently presented and tackle the high level of saliency that sexuality, race and the supernatural possess in both the novel and the series in relation to well-chosen reference corpora. One common theme that links and adds an interesting layer to both chapters 2 and 3 on a topical level is their shared focus on issues surrounding sexuality and race.

Four chapters in this edited volume are concerned with ‘Telecinematic discourse’ (Part II), with each one of these being intriguingly dedicated to a different telecinematic genre. Tatyana Karpenko-Seccombe (pp. 59–88) chooses a corpus-stylistic and quantitative approach – employing keyness calculation – in attending to distinctive communicative and linguistic features of interactions in the reality TV show Love Island UK (2021–). In chapter 5 (pp. 89–108), Susan Reichelt focuses on diegetic codes and scripted code-switches between English and Spanish in the US-American TV series Jane the Virgin developed by Jennie Snyder Urman (2014–19). She adeptly examines the layers of scripted fictional telecinematic speech in lockstep with multimodal cues and in light of ideological stance expressed. Christoph Schubert zooms in on the – indeed – ‘highly appealing’ aesthetic effects of suspense (p. 109; cf. pp. 109–29). Schubert adheres to Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight (2015) as his object of study and neatly demonstrates how a sequential organization of diegetic dialogue turns creates suspense through foregrounded pragma-stylistic techniques. As he is able to show, verbal suspense in The Hateful Eight is created by a range of stylistic features that are strategically positioned turn-by-turn and thereby fabricate suspense along the sequential pattern of ‘expectation, delay, and resolution’ (p. 125). Chapter 7 (pp. 130–55), the fourth and final chapter of Part II of this volume, is authored by Christian R. Hoffmann. With his usual aplomb, Hoffmann contributes what is a meticulous and neatly replicable application of Schegloff's (1979) and Hopper's (1989) established structural patterns of phone call openings in real speech to fictional phone calls occurring in contemporary US-American fully scripted feature films.

Two chapters address issues related to pop music (Part III). In chapter 8 (pp. 156–75), Lisa Jansen and Anika Gerfer choose a variational angle zooming in on Alexander Turner, Englishman and frontman of the Arctic Monkeys. In an insightful analysis and discussion they dissect Turner's stylistic use of an American accent on stage as part of his ‘performance-based idiosyncrasy’ (p. 169). Valentin Werner contributes chapter 9 (pp. 176–204), a mixed-method study that diachronically focuses on rapper Eminem's stylistic history and development with regard to his lyrics in comparison to Northern American rap in general. In a methodologically sophisticated analysis, Werner adroitly demonstrates the added value of (corpus-)stylistic approaches to performed language and pop cultural artifacts that may – due to their saliently offensive and profanity-laden nature – traditionally rather have deterred than attracted scholarly interest.

Part IV of the volume attends to the pop cultural spheres in cartoons on the one hand and video games on the other. Cecelia Cutler dedicates chapter 10 (pp. 205–26) to a concise socio-pragmatic analysis of Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–23), and showcases how stereotypical linguistic variations and behaviors in the cartoon would systematically promote racial othering. In chapter 11 (pp. 227–46), Dušan Stamenković takes a diachronic approach to multimodality in the video game series Football Manager, convincingly arguing that ‘video game stylistics surfaces as … a needed addition to the range of phenomena traditionally addressed by stylistics scholars’ (p. 241).

Last but not least, let me comment on the stage-setting introductory chapter provided by the two editors of this volume as well as Michael Toolan's concise and insightful epilogue (chapter 12, pp. 247–52). I am commenting on these two parts in the same breath, as they do in fact do an excellent job in conjointly laying out the potential range of linguistic and, specifically, stylistic approaches to pop cultural materials. The editors’ understanding and application of ‘style’ and ‘stylistics’ follow Leech & Short (2007) and Jeffries & McIntyre (2010) respectively, thus firmly framing their deliberations within the context of traditional and substantial linguistic scholarship. At the same time, Werner and Schubert diligently carve out the range of stylistic-linguistic disciplines and areas that have (often interactively and overlappingly) been pushing forth the kinds of innovative angles and leading questions that the very chapters compiled in this volume have taken as springboards themselves, thereby ‘excitingly extend[ing] familiar topic[s] to … new field[s] of operation’ (Toolan, p. 250).

Toolan's afterword neatly complements Werner and Schubert's introduction in two ways: for one, by pointing out some of the central highlights of this volume and, thereupon, offering a few worthwhile outlooks and implications for future research. A second and particularly strong take-away from Toolan's concluding chapter to this volume is his eloquent and impassioned plea essentially aligning with one of the core messages Werner (2018a), amongst others, has been disseminating and promoting for a few years now. That is, the tenet that the ambiguous label ‘pop(ular)’ in e.g. pop culture (or also: pop music, pop art, etc.) in and of itself – in a self-contradictory manner – seems to have essentially contributed to the low linguistic value often assigned to pop cultural artefacts, while the fact that ‘high status’ works such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (late fourteenth century) have been canonized exactly because they also were widely ‘popular’ and appreciated has been blatantly overlooked.

In the end, Toolan intermittently closes the matter by rightly observing that, so far, the evidence does not suggest that the stylistic analysis of pop cultural texts, on the one hand, and of high culture texts and fiction, on the other hand, would be significantly different (p. 248). This then aligns closely with a tenet Joseph Trotta has been sharing (most recently in a plenary given at the University of Bamberg, 2023; but also 2018), i.e. that it is in fact high time that scholars of scripted speech in specific and of pop cultural materials in general stopped defending their choice of object material altogether.

All this being said, the editors of this volume have done a remarkable job in assembling a small yet expressive range of contributions that excellently showcase not only the heterogeneity that is arguably inherent to phenomena of pop cultural relevance to begin with, but, on a larger scale, that there is indeed an undoubtable benefit in linguistic – and specifically stylistic – approaches to pop cultural artefacts and discourses. In fact, I personally would not even have found the somewhat narrow sectioning of included chapters into parts necessary. After all, I consider it a particular asset of this volume that the editors have managed to bring together so many different yet coalescing approaches and pop cultural genres overall, with each paper assembled in this volume representing an intertextual and interconnecting hub in and of itself.

With its multifarious topics discussed and various methodological and stylistic approaches taken – amongst them all of the five areas that the editors mention as the currently most salient, i.e. pragmatic, cognitive, social, corpus and multimodal stylistics (pp. 7ff.) – Christoph Schubert and Valentin Werner's volume will certainly be of much interest and inspiration to colleagues as well as students across linguistic disciplines, literary studies, media studies and cultural studies, equipping them with a range of tools for unlocking topical, multimodal and genre-specific access points to pop cultural linguistics and stylistics.