Blurb:

This essay attempts to develop a Marxist feminist contextualised stylistics. For this purpose I shall be drawing on the distinctly unfashionable work of Louis Althusser, a Marxist literary theorist, together with feminist stylistics and literary theory (Althusser, 1984; see also Burton, 1982; Threadgold 1988a,b). It may be argued that the combination of Marxism, feminism and stylistics is indeed a heady brew, but it is a necessary combination in order to overcome some of the problems encountered both in traditional stylistic analysis and in Marxist analyses. These theoretical positions can be combined to produce an analysis which is theoretically rigorous, and which at the same time, enables the reader to a engage with a text.