Linguistics and Literary History systematically explores the advantages of an inter-disciplinary approach within the broad area of English studies. It brings together stylistics, literary theory and diachronic linguistics in order to explore their interaction at various methodological, descriptive and interpretative levels. This unique combination makes this volume on historical stylistics an important work for international scholars and postgraduate students working on the interface between literary history and language change, both from corpus-based and qualitative perspectives. The chapters written by leading scholars in these various fields are an appropriate reference work for teaching and research purposes in the areas of stylistics, historical linguistics, English language and literature, corpus linguistics and literary history.