Stylistics is the study and interpretation of texts in regard to their linguistic and tonal style. As a discipline, it links
literary criticism to
linguistics. It does not function as an autonomous domain on its own, and can be applied to an understanding of
literature and
journalism as well as
linguistics. Sources of study in stylistics may range from canonical works of writing to popular texts, and from
advertising copy to
news, non-fiction, and
popular culture, as well as to
political and
religious discourse. Indeed, as recent work in Critical Stylistics, Multimodal Stylistics and
Mediated Stylistics has made clear, non-literary texts may be of just as much interest to stylisticians as literary ones. Literariness, in other words, is here conceived as 'a point on a cline rather than as an absolute'.